Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com