Buddha and Mind
neh.gov
neh.gov
David Chapman has a whole (long, elaborate) theory about this:
https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism
(actually I guess you could spend several days tracking down all of the different pieces of this account that Chapman has written across his several web sites!)
As morbid as that is, I feel like I would actually gain a lot of value from doing that...
It just seems silly to deny possibilities.
It's much more open-ended to say the opposite; that it's possible until it's proven not to be.
Much of our knowledge was discovered or formulated either because a person didn't know it "wasn't possible" or in defiance of consensus.
"Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris."
(Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return.)
a liturgical adaptation of Genesis 3:19.
How well has this been replicated? Has a non-buddhist person ever been able to demonstrate similar feats?
It's such an astounding claim. I want to believe, but am still skeptical because it just so astounding.
It is 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and the study mentions 8.3 degrees Celsius. A linked follow up study in 2013 was able to reproduce temperature increases between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius [2] Also, the results suggest that "...the peripheral temperature increases are primarily the result of increased peripheral blood flow due to peripheral muscular action (and proximity of the femoral artery) rather than a result of psychological (caused by meditation) or physiological (caused by breathing or isometric techniques) states." It looks like it is caused by blood vessels opening up (vasodilation) as a response to certain kinds of breathing exercises. If true, it is just an indirect result of the practice, not some form of body control that extends to other use cases.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harvard-study-confirms-tib... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
It looks like he can control his immune response too.
I recommend reading Breath, by James Nestor.
I also recommend only taking cold showers, because they feel great afterwards and because they save water and heat energy. “Breathing up” beforehand helps me bite the bullet if I’m feeling reticent.
The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all.
C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan, but nothing in between. If you reject spirituality at least you acknowledge to take it seriously on its own terms, if you commit to it that's fine as well, but when you profane religious practices by turning them into some kind of corporate new-age productivity exercise in my mind it's about the worst of all worlds.
One of the things my master would emphasise a lot was that physical yoga is the first stage on the spiritual path and meditation is the last. But he says they are easy to teach and have become completely commercialised in the West only because they are both really easy to instruct.
He cautioned us against the perils of meditation when you are unqualified, pointing out that it may lead to mental illness. In general, the qualification for meditation is total uparati, withdrawal from the world. A state of mind where the objects and beings of the external world have no sway on the mind at all — he would say “there is no push from within, there is no pull from without.” He said trying to meditate with the mind of a typical Westerner is like suddenly putting a brick wall in front of a car speeding on the highway. You will crash and it will be painful.
Some of the Upanisads have lines which repeat which say “this must not be spoken of” — being suitable only for prepared students, but now people walk around talking about illusions and maya like it’s just another How to Win Friends and Influence People or something.
If anyone is interested in reading his perspective on meditation, the chapter with the same name in Vedanta Treatise by A Parthasarathy is instructive.
My opinion about this meditation thing is that there's something in it, but telling people not to try because it may accidentally destroy their mind is laughable. By the time one develops will so strong and concentration so stable that it may cause issues, one must already be knowledable enough.
(One other reason: I had a horrific experience on a dissociative drug that, on further research, seemed to mirror the experience of many meditators who hit that brick wall you mentioned. It was the worst experience of my life, and if I risk hitting that wall again through meditation, it's not worth it for me.)
Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord
And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about.
He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization.
A con artist who did the same thing.
Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it
Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.
CS Lewis' Jesus is the result of judicious editing by the Council of Nicaea leaving a lot on the cutting room floor.
>Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.
He was a Christian. By definition he believed in the correctness of scripture. He wasn't actually trying to consider rational alternatives to Jesus' divinity, but to convince the listener that simply accepting Jesus as a moral teacher was absurd with a classic false dichotomy - that one must either accept Jesus as the Son of God or dismiss him as a lunatic. Of course, those aren't really the only possibilities, as the criticism page on Lewis' trilemma shows[0].
I'd argue Rome had a lot more to do with that than Jesus. If Emperor Constantine hadn't found Christians to be expedient to his own political ends, the religion would probably have remained a strictly local Jewish cult, or been stamped out by Rome altogether.
All I know is what Lewis thought on the matter.
Horrible example considering that all evidence suggests that "in between" is the right answer: that Jesus was a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews and that was what the cult was centered around for hundreds of years before Jesus was elevated to being the son of God. It's strange that he'd assume the story had not changed.
C.S. Lewis was a Christian so he is using two-value logic. Most Asian philosophies is based on four-value logic hence difficult for Westerners to comprehend in full.
Jesus could have been liar or god or both or neither.
Exemplified by the fact that someone who uses Buddhism as some sort of glorified productivity tool hasn't learned anything from Buddhism but does exactly what Buddhism tries to eliminate, namely desire and the self.
The entire mechanistic thinking of treating culture like some kind of junkyard that can be scrapped for parts is itself a product of a sort of spiritually dead worldview.
In the west we seem to correlate "enlightenment" with some level of "perfection", but I think that's actually pretty far removed from what many eastern traditions consider it. This results in us having weird expectations about how somebody who is "enlightened" should behave.
I think it's totally possible that Culadasa has had the experience of "enlightenment" (a certain state the brain can exist in). But it seems like this state may actually be morally neutral.
There's a reason the Eightfold Path in Buddhism isn't just "meditate really good until you reach enlightenment".
So what I mean is that some people, like Culudasa, probably experienced a brain state that might be called "enlightenment" in some contexts. But either we've been way oversold what that actually means, or he only reached one of the lower "stages of awakening" and hadn't yet fully, and permanently, abandoned all the fetters.
(I tend to think it's probably the former.)
No tradition have exclusive rights either.
What we can do is point the direction, what it is not, etc., when someone is seeking realization.
My eventual take loosely is that the guy was somewhat of a charlatan/double-minded from the start so, it's fine - it's still worth trying to free yourself of desire you can probably do something like that, and best to go on as if this guy never existed.
EDIT: seems like there's a lot more to the story, and I think the poster you're replying to is assuming only the worst possible interpretation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/...
Also, apparently he now has terminal cancer, and likely has less than a year to live. He's staying with family, which makes the above posters comment about "he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)" seem untrue and unnecessarily cruel.
What you direct when you pay attention. What you concentrate when you concentrate. What gets jerked around when you are distracted.
(As opposed to "Mind", synonymous with "intellect", which is not what they mean. Call it a bad translation)
''Provocatively illustrates how mindfulness has been hijacked by corporate interests, turned into an opiate of the masses, and how we can radically rethink the meaning of mindfulness in contemporary life.'' -- Dr. Steven Stanley, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University
I've seen a number of articles on HN talking about people becoming depressed, depersonalized and so on after trying mindfulness meditation and I find it anecdotally interesting that it lines up with the teachings I am familiar with.
As soon as one chimp has a realization about its mind, it then thinks all the other chimps should and can have it too. Which is as dumb as a mango tree discovering it can produce a mango, and then walking around encouraging banana trees to try to do the same. The banana tree will fail no matter how much it studies the mango tree. It might even forgot it is capable of producing bananas.
And I completely agree that people need to handle their psychic health before they go down these rabbit holes. Reality can get very fuzzy for anyone, let alone someone who's already depressive, manic, or dissociative.
Could you elaborate on this? How does it help?
Once you find out a few times that they aren't it can pretty fundamentally change some of your perceptions
They're either wholly manufactured (dreams), or partially manufactured (flawed senses and biases).
This tends to make me very mindful when awake, and very lucid while asleep
(like what's an engineer but a man who uses his awareness like a hammer, beating riddles into submission?)
Learning to use your awareness intelligently strikes me as close to an unalloyed good thing. Meditation can do that.
I have never heard of a meditation technique that was not simply a variation on those 2. But if you have one then I am all ears.
Also, ya, you could say that meditation touches some other stuff than just "getting intelligent with your awareness". Sure.
And as far as other ways of getting intelligent with your awareness are concerned. Ya sure, I can imagine such existing.
Also. Ya. Meditation can lead to much crazy. But that's a good education :)
There are over 100 meditations defined in Indian traditions. They're all useless without direction.
I can go with that.
>It needs direction
You mean like a goal?
>Something which karma yoga may provide for societal concerns
I think it's closer to aesthetics.
>There are over 100 meditations defined in Indian traditions. They're all useless without direction.
Meditation can be approached as an experiment and an exploration. No goal necessary.
And when investigating a true mystery I think that a goal is inappropriate.
1. Meditation as a tool for self-improvement
Meditation, especially and specifically Buddhist meditation, has been sold to Westerners as a tool for self improvement for the purpose of "getting a leg up" and as another commenter pointed out, this is self-defeating.
Buddhism, as taught by the Buddha himself, was about getting off the hamster wheel. It's about a prince who stepped down, but also who did not try to somehow get a leg up through suffering. But using Buddhism to get ahead in the corporate world is ultimately fraught with a contradiction of clarity, honesty, kindness, etc. with the tools often used in business- deception, exploitation, etc.- tools that are enforced by the constraints placed on corporate leadership.
2. Mindfulness as a tool of blame
One of the paradoxes of Buddhism, but specifically Zen, is the idea that the practice teaches you to be able to handle enormous stress. Practioners are taught to stay in meditation through physical distress, through mental distress, even while being hit with sticks, etc. This is a form of training.
What we have seen is that some unscrupulous people are using this as a way to exploit workers. "If you're stressed out, that's on you for not being strong enough/meditating enough." rather than address the working conditions.
3. Meditation as a badge
People will misuse anything as a badge, and meditation is no exception. There are meditation "jocks" (for lack of a better word)- people who will go to retreats and push themselves to meditate in harsh conditions or for long periods. They will then come back and use this as a signal to others of their greatness. It's paradoxical to the ideals of Buddhism, but it nonetheless exists, and it's used in ways that other signals often are- as a way to create cliques and networks.
4. Inwards looking as the only direction
Looking inward is great, but meditation and mindfulness are not substitutions for other types of self improvement, including therapy.
All of those can be true and it can be true that meditation is great and helpful. Any practice can be too much, or weaponized.
Those are just some of my thoughts on the topic.
Let me pick on this bit, because I have experience here.
That sounds like a crappy, knockoff kind of zen. Any group worth their salt will know the difference. You can have some legitimate, profound, and just plain really engaging and mind-blowing experiences with zen practice, but you gotta practice correctly. Lifting weights any which way is a good way to hurt yourself, but lifting weights correctly can put on some muscle.
On the surface, you're just moving heavy weights around, but that's not really the point. It's the form, consistency, and holistic routine that matters in weight-lifting. In the same way, zen practice might look like it's just beating people with lack of sleep and sticks, but what matters is how these are executed and how they work together. Done correctly, intense willpower and mental fortitude are mostly orthogonal concerns.
If it is, it's a long standing one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keisaku
The stick is meant to "wake up" practioners but it's also used to help them learn to endure pain. But also, simply sitting in place for long periods can be painful- knee pain, lower back pain, etc. are common. Zen training is about letting of the need to react to it, accepting it and continuing, just as one learns to endure and not react to thoughts that arise, or emotions that come and go.
Leg pain is also, of course, a thing, but this is purely incidental in my experience. Modulo special circumstances, the lotus position is really good at minimizing pain when sitting for extended periods. Of course, if your legs are not flexible enough to sit in lotus, then even zen monks will sit in half- or even quarter-lotus. I've even seen exceptional cases of people sitting in other positions for medical reasons, but over time, most gravitate to full lotus.
> Zen training is about letting of the need to react to it, accepting it and continuing, just as one learns to endure and not react to thoughts that arise, or emotions that come and go.
That's way too complicated. I'd be inclined to say that zazen is about folding your legs and sitting. Everything that happens in that space is orthogonal to your butt on the cushion, which is such a freeing feeling to directly encounter oneself.
People can encounter quite a bit of pain from sitting but the advice is to relax and "let go" of the suffering as much as possible rather than "soldier on".
Some forms of meditation can be inherently risky for people facing mental illness or emotional distress. That's why a good teacher is needed.
> idea that the practice teaches you to be able to handle enormous stress.
I never heard this in a Zen setting.
> Practioners are taught to stay in meditation through physical distress, through mental distress, even while being hit with sticks, etc. This is a form of training.
Phrased like this it sounds like Full Metal Jacket.
Zen, and meditation in general, can push people into confronting their emotions and inpulses and can be challenging, like psychotherapy. But it's not an ascetic practice and the endurance of suffering is not its goal.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Dharma-Meditation-Contempla...
Here's an organization dedicated to helping people who've been destabilized by meditation: https://www.cheetahhouse.org/
Not arguing that meditation can’t have downsides, but I think you’re way over exaggerating them.
Here[1] is a recent HN discussion about an article[2] about just this. And here[3] is an earlier discussion about a similar article[4].
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790
[2] - https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11752317
[4] - http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-k...
How do you make ‘self-help’ from a philosophy that teaches that there is no permanent self to help?
Using meditation to improve in moving up in society is like using wood logs to put out a fire.
There are probably hundreds of different techniques of meditation, in many different traditions, and with different aims.
For some, like in many types of Christian meditation, the purpose can be to deepen one's relationship with God. Quieting the mind or stillness might be part of a way to get there, but not the ultimate aim.
Even in Buddhism, there are, say, so-called loving-kindess-meditation which is less about quieting the mind than about increasing compassion and goodwill towards oneself and others.
In Buddhism there are also forms of meditation that seek simple nonjudgmental awareness, and others (like "just sitting") don't have any aim at all.
In various tantric forms of meditation the goal might be to liberate sexual energy.
Vajrayana Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sufism have many of their own forms of meditations with various aims.
A true Buddhist would argue that divinity is within a truly quiet mind.
See my username for one such practice
And it's also what Christian mystics like Meiser Eckert and and Gnostics also believe.
The stereotype of the noble destitute is overplayed. Wanting to be able to provide for my family and have financial security can be noble as well. It’s how one accomplishes those things that can be unethical.
Perhaps mindfulness helps someone stay grounded so that their focus on money doesn’t inflate their ego?
But seriously please don’t use stereotypes even if the stereotyped is of a group that is commonly thought of as in power.
The western interpretation of meditation is that the rat race can stress you out so meditate once in a while so you can keep running. Hence the name mindfulness based stress reduction.
This can help a lot of people but this was not what the Buddha was about. Buddhism goes far deeper and it’s understandable why they want to sell a more sanitized version. I can’t imagine a corporation paying for a spiritual practice that would make their employees question if working their lives away was really worth it.
The Buddha wanted us to transcend ourselves. To realize the illusory nature of most of our conceptions of ourselves. It’s not an app or a success technique. It’s something beyond all such ideas.
As a practitioner of a Buddhist practice (see my username), meditation is about developing and mastering concentration the mind. The Buddha taught Meditation with out precepts (or living a moral life properly aligned with the universe) was in vain. This is this the reason the Buddha stressed precepts on how one should live as ultimately a mind focused on the material world and self interest will never have the stillness of one living a life of virtue for others which is why many people find meditation so awesome until they try to still there minds and blame the practice for this inability like in this article.
The problem I see is the framing of meditation into the portrait of modern society.
Most of the meditation I've studied taught me that quieting one's mind was not the goal and further not possible.
It's a science to this, not just one end game. Different meditations have different purposes, etc.
What is my purpose? May be a good question to ponder for direction.
Let's stop making these kinds of silly generalizations. Within the United States there is a vast, vast diversity of opinion on basically any idea. I'm sure its similar virtually everywhere.
Much like it’s not really a thing to be racist against those who identify as White; they’re in power and might be expected to have the wherewithal to take it without getting defensive.
Another more palatable example might be “roasting” celebrities; would it be okay to pick on in such a way those far lower on the economic ladder as they struggle to meet their basic needs in the face of generational stress and trauma?
"culturally dominant materialism that we find surrounding us" is not implying that each and every person is materialistic.
The word "dominant" implies the presence of other, non-dominant cultures.
Another version of nirvana brings back the learnings to other humans and help alleviate their suffering.
Ego inflation causes a lot of the suffering for sure, but you can’t function as a human without ego either. To deny it is to deny humanity, to escape into a baby or animal like state.
On the other hand spiritual inflation (i.e bypass) of this sort can be just as bad; ego evolved because it was evolutionarily adaptive (despite having massive failure modes). You can meditate in complete peace only if you free ride others taking care of business of the real world.
Sati also means to remember, anamnesis in Plato’s terms. Among many, to remember who you are; not a god, not a devil, a human that evolved into consciousness and now has to reconcile the upstairs and the downstairs of reality with your fallacious cognitive machinery the best way you can.