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Comment by jules22 | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t avoid the Rocky Mountains because they reinforce my friend’s beliefs about God

I do avoid them (figuratively, not literally) because I value my critical thinking.

What I observe in meditators is a gradual loss of trust in logic, reason and science, even in those with decades of education. They fall for silly quackeries and psychic beliefs or that the meditation teacher mystically can know things and have insight beyond even experts.

If they produced some new knowledge through that, I would be all for it. But no, it just is a collapse of common sense.

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> a gradual loss of trust in logic, reason and science, even in those with decades of education. They fall for silly quackeries and psychic beliefs or that the meditation teacher mystically can know things

This is again all very vague, so it’s difficult to understand your perspective. Silly quackeries like what?

It also doesn’t align with what I’ve experienced, or have observed in others: I’m still a staunch believer in logic, reason and science. Have never felt the need to take on psychic beliefs, etc.

I’m not saying you’re wrong about the people you’re referring to, I just don’t have a similar frame of reference.

Quite possible. We might also be talking about different kinds of meditation. Mindfulness meditators seem to have a healthy attitude. TM meditators start talking psychic things pretty quickly. The people around me are all TM types.

Yeah, TM is quite a different thing.

The recent scientific interest in meditation is primarily focused on the mindfulness variety, which is more about observing your state of mind without judgement, and learning to stop getting lost in discursive thought, vs. TM's focus on mantras. (there are TM studies, but mindfulness has gotten wider attention, with good reason I think).

While the mindfulness family of practices has been well secularized, it does seem that TM brings a lot more baggage along with it.

I think this still boils down to the person practicing. While researching/evaluating meditation practices, TM was something that I decided to steer clear of, for many of the reasons you describe.

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