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Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

Meditation is not taboo in a lot of societies.

Then why is there no serious discussion about it to be found anywhere? All I see is bland self-help books and an occasional vague article in a psych journal.

Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

I'd say the absence of those indicates that there is in fact an implicit taboo attached to practicing meditation for the sake of meditation itself.

> Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult? Where are the online forums where people discuss their experiences that aren't overrun with New Age cranks? Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

Why is it a taboo unless you totally secularise it? I’m not following. Meditation comes from a religious context, and I don’t see why it’s a taboo just because that context remains

Further, the secular mindfulness and meditation movements are huge, and there are many serious secular oriented meditation books (TMI, MCTB, etc. tho I’m not personally a fan of them)

> Meditation comes from a religious context

I have seen no evidence of this. Many religious practices involve meditation. But they also commonly involve song; it doesn’t follow that singing comes from a religious context.

I have never encountered a form of meditation that wasn’t heavily inspired by a religious context, most often Vedic traditions or Buddhism. Can you give an example of a historically completely secular form of meditation?

Our earliest written records mention meditation within religious contexts. Both predate history. All modern organised practices of meditation derive from religious sources, but organised practices of meditation is a subset of meditation—mindfully training attention and awareness to achieve “a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state” [1]. (Seen another way: almost all our historical sources about medicine mention it in a religious context. That doesn’t mean medicine comes from religion.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

This contradicts your singing example, since not all singing derives from religious sources, so why bring it up? You are making the same point as me right now: all modern meditation comes from religious sources

> not all singing derives from religious sources

If you look for the oldest written songs, they’re invariably religious. The evidence used to establish meditation as religiously derived is sufficient to prove the same for song.

In fact, with the evidence at hand, I could just as easily argue that all religion derives from meditation. Secularly speaking, that is a simpler hypothesis than the inverse.

> all modern meditation comes from religious sources

I said modern organised practices of meditation come from religious sources. That caveat is as big as the difference between organised religion and sprituality, generally.

I'm not sure that singing is really that separated from religious context. You'd have a hard time becoming a classically trained singer without singing a lot of classical Christian music. You wouldn't get far in Blues or Bluegrass without being exposed to traditional spirituals.

https://positivepsychology.com/history-of-meditation/

> The earliest written records of meditation come from the Hindu Vedas around 1500 BCE (Sharma, 2015). The Torah also contains a description of the patriarch Isaac going to “lasuach” in a field, a kind of Jewish meditation most likely practiced around 1000 BCE (Kaplan, 1985).

> I have seen no evidence of this.

That doesn't imply no evidence. In fact, there is tons of evidence that meditation originated from a religious context. It is not even controversial.

I don't think there's any taboo on meditation, and it's not associated with any religion or cult. Your doctor most likely would tell you to go ahead, it can't hurt, it has research behind it, and lots of his/her patients do it.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/meditation/about...

> Where are the meditation instructions that don't reference "Buddha nature", "divine light", or similar supernatural ballast?

I really like the website/app called Waking Up by Sam Harris, I think it fits your description.

I don't think "Buddha nature" is a supernatural belief, but Sam Harris certainly subscribes to (some of) Dzogchen Buddhism. If his site doesn't mention it he's just worded differently.

There's Daniel Ingram's stuff, I liked his book and there's a forum at https://www.dharmaoverground.org/ , haven't checked out how cranky it is.

Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated is detailed, non-mystical and seems to have a solid following with an active /r/TheMindIlluminated subreddit. /r/streamentry subreddit seems to also be pretty focused.

Rob Burbea and Shinzen Young have also written a bunch of non-vague, non-mystical stuff and seem to be well regarded.

With practice one is able to carve out a stable pleasant mind mind set that is like an art work, a sculpture, a statue, a bit of music or just like a song, only it is constructed out of a carefully measured mix of moods and emotions. It is like a place you can visit just by thinking of it. We (quite hilariously) only know a flavor of this called being in the zone. (from repeatedly doing a thing and cultivating the mind set along with it) Our culture is about productivity after all, its quite suitable. A weird cult worshiping banks and corporations. Money is like a voodoo doll, you can have other believers do almost anything for it. I wouldn't even know where to begin taking care of myself. ha-ha

> Where are the meditation groups that aren't beholden to some religion or cult

Do we need a let me Google Scholar that for you? Meditation is intensely researched by serious people not beholden to pseudoscience.

I think you missed mindfulness - it's being integrated into a lot of psychological therapies (DBT, MCBT). It's strongly based on meditation, if not meditation repackaged.

There are a ton of things out there which contradict what you said. Some samples:

Here is a hospital promoting meditation:

https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/health-wellness/mental-...

Journal on mindfulness:

https://www.springer.com/journal/12671

Meditation research group Harvard:

https://meditation.mgh.harvard.edu/index.html

Also: consciousness is the core part (equivalent to God) of Hinduism (where a lot of Eastern meditative traditions originate from) and hence it is intertwined with religion.

I've been drawing together a bunch of HN readers interested in this stuff for several years, and have a new discussion group coming together now.

Email me if interested (address in profile).

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