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Comment by leashless | Hacker News Reader

http://files.howtolivewiki.com/.meditation_2015/transcripts/... This came out of an attempt to strip the core meditation techniques down to completely remove the mysticism, and adjust the practice cycle for long-term solo practitioners who are agnostic or atheist and can't lean on concepts like "The Buddha" or "Lord Shiva" (although I myself am Hindu.)

The critical innovation is doing ten minute rounds of different practices, so no practice is held for very long. This seems to help a ton with "mind wanders" and surprisingly doesn't seem to impair overall progress at all. If anything the rotation of practices seems to improve overall concentration and keeps people from hallucinating because they've been staring at a blank wall for six hours!

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> who are agnostic or atheist and can't lean on concepts like "The Buddha" or "Lord Shiva" (although I myself am Hindu.)

Whoever can accept the Gödel's incompleteness theorems and still use math, doesn't mind games, simulations and usage of different dimensionalities and topologies, also can practice both visual and sensory imagination - is perfectly capable of believing in Buddha, Shiva, whoever and whatever for the duration of the exercise if they chose to. Blieving in a diety with certain characteristics, an embodiment of certain archetypes/feelings/intentions during the practice can do night-and-day difference in efficiency and precision of intentional nervous system regulation.

Going from a card carrying atheist(youth..gah!) to a more sensible agnostic to dipping my toes into faith again has been interesting. A covid revival and immersion.

Spirituality + Meditation/Mindfulness + Religion is definitely more colourful..trippy. I don’t know why. Can’t articulate.

The only downside is the random fanatic, but I guess they exist amongst the atheists too.

The poverty of imagination that marks spirituality without religion is debilitating to sustaining any kind of life long practice. Happily, the flavor of religion of my birth family affords me all the pagan goodness and room to explore freely. Life is good now. Better..rather.

I've read at least three books on meditation and worked with a variety of apps, recordings, etc, and as these are all created for a western audience I've never seen anything mystical or religious in any of them. Anything by Jon Kabat-Zinn should be pretty free of religiosity for example , as his goal was to promote mindfulness within a medical setting.

Yeah, the distinction may be that this is an “enlightenment driven” program —- an hour a day for ten years, coupled to therapy. Most of the enlightenment driven work out there is relatively religious and spends a lot of time on faith in lineage etc. This was an experiment to skip all that and just work the core practices very very hard and results are pretty good over seven or eight years.

I should have clarified that in the earlier post. I should also note that I’m not a dharma teacher by trade: I do that as a hobby, mostly I run a tech company. I teach out of respect for my own teacher but am not making “a thing” of it.

Which I think keeps me honest: zero money changes hands etc.

For what it's worth, the "faith in lineage" stuff doesn't require magical thinking and is pretty helpful. The downside of it from my perspective is it's just a lot of stuff to learn and a bit complicated to maintain in a Western cultural context. Plenty of people are making progress with more stripped-down approaches that rhyme better with the scientific worldview.

The main problem with « faith in lineage » is that it’s institutionalized argument by authority. It’s a giant bias.

It's more like "adopting the view that this will work," because doing that works. It's a pragmatic argument, in practice. Dogma certainly creeps in when you get away from practice into politics, but "bias" isn't a concern in awakening. It's all about what works.

However, it turns out not to be necessary or desirable for this approach. It might be necessary or useful for some practices, but not this one!

> Welcome to that there meditation class. I’m Vinay. This is intended as a private recording (and transcript) so please don’t stick it on YouTube. I will pass it around to people who should have a copy.

I guess this technically wasn't stuck on YouTube...

The restriction was useful in 2015 because we were still testing the system. Now it's had 7 years to settle in and we've come to think it's pretty much safe as long as people don't ignore the therapy requirement.

And I am Vinay.

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