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Comment by thenerdhead | Hacker News Reader

> “My hope is that ultimately, this work will contribute to bringing advanced meditation out of the monastery,” Sacchet said, describing its “incredible promise for moving beyond addressing mental health issues, toward helping people thrive.”

What exactly is considered "advanced meditation"? I've been meditating for years, but don't do it for hours each day or go on extended silent retreats. I've read many practices too and I'm not aware of anything "advanced" outside of just spending more time and revolving more of your life around it. 10-15 minutes a day already does wonders for me.

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There's a lot of different practices, though in a lot of schools that have practiced meditation for centuries, "Mindfulness" style meditation – what's largely practiced in the west – is just one aspect. The Dalai Lama, for instance, discuss at length in his books deeper phases of meditation that focus on things like "emptiness" [1] or compassion, loving-kindness, etc. Someone who's more knowledgable can correct me if I'm wrong, but the 'mindfulness' type meditation is almost like a warmup for these other forms of meditation.

1: Emptiness meditation, best I can describe it, is sort of like meditating on how something like a "Chair" falls apart under scrutiny. We perceive it as a solid object, yet when you analyze its parts, it tends to 'fall apart', and what makes it a "Chair" becomes hard to pin down. You start to see it more as a coming together of many things, each of which also tends to fall apart under scrutiny. Worth pointing out that this 'emptiness' is not the same as nihilism.

Ah I see. So the subject/practice of your meditation is what is considered advanced. i.e. metta, vipassana, samatha, etc. I read the entire article and it hardly spoke about what is considered "advanced" from the monasteries.

There are "attainments" or maps. A lot of teachers don't communicate them since it can be a bit of a trap, since striving to reach an attainments can prevent you from reaching it.

More contemporary dharma teachers have been willing to go into it. The jhanas is one such map.

As an intermediary step simply being able to stay with your breath for an hour while still being aware/not falling asleep is a good goal.

http://studybuddhism.com/en/advanced-studies

It seems they're using the term to distinguish "meditation for emotional regulation" (v1 research) from "meditation for itself" (v2 research)

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