Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

The end goal of mindfulness is to make you realize that you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you." With enough practice you will get there, and it's interesting to be able to meditate to the point where you briefly experience periods where you don't exist. Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention. The only way I've found to keep on living happily is to basically ignore the outcome of mindfulness.

View on HN

https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad

...* distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.*

> Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention.

I wonder if part of the problem is exposing people to a visceral understanding of that without also teaching them an intellectual understanding. I.e. that if the universe is deterministic, then all their actions were predetermined at the start of the universe, and there's no sense in worrying about the future because there's nothing we can do to change it. And to the extent that the universe is non-deterministic, the added randomness means we have even less (still zero) influence over future outcomes. In this light, the notion of "self" drops away as an arbitrary distinction among cogs in a single machine, and without the self there's no way to think thoughts like "I am sad" or "I am unhappy". Because such thoughts rely on belief in the existence of "I".

I can imagine it causing trauma when someone suddenly feels via meditation that they have no "I", but have no way of understanding/processing this on an intellectual level.

Who knows, maybe there's an I, but it's not what we think it is.

Every proper religion has two sides: public and occult. Buddhism is a very elaborate, but still public and thus simplified teaching. The complexity and level of detail of Buddhism was appropriate at the time it was last updated.

For example, the meaning of word "I" from the occult perspective is interesting. That I is the number 1, the number of abstract spirit - the immutable mathematical principle behind reality. So that "I" exists, but it's unreal and it's shared by all humans.

I think there are two kind of separate topics here: mindfulness meditation and enlightenment. Mindfulness meditation can be useful just as a tool to improve attention and awareness in daily life. To “achieve enlightenment” you may or may not use mindfulness meditation, and in fact it may be the wrong tool for your needs. E.g., if you really must right a wrong in your life in order for you to personally come to terms with it, no amount of mindfulness meditation will get you beyond that.

That might have been your goal, and I'm not surprised it left you depressed. It certainly wasn't mine.

At a somewhat deeper level, you realize that there are many forms of non-existence. Yours is different from, say, that of Napoleon, and also from that of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

> you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you."

Have you ever considered that all of this might be gobbledygook that obviously doesn't even serve you well?

There is no “you” to serve :) . There is no ghost in the machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com