Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdudekul | Hacker News Reader

Pursuing Meditation as a way to make more money or increase business productivity/bottomline, is too narrow and simplistic. Daily meditation (specifically Passage Meditation http://www.easwaran.org/) practice has changed my life's priorities dramatically.

At the risk of sounding a little too touchy-feely, Meditation helps you:

a) Be more compassionate and choose what is right, instead of what brings more material wealth.

b) Bring more clarity and focus to what you are doing.

c) Understand yourself and others better, forgive yourself and others easily, love yourself and others unconditionally.

View on HN

I don't understand why mental clarity must lead to certain outcomes. What's wrong with seeking peace in order to find ways to market things better? Or seeking calm and finding inner strength to go and wipe out a troublesome group of people?

While those might seem abhorrent to us, a mind improving practice should work for any goal. It's not like exercising doesn't work to your advantage if you're evil.

To the point: if one is not interested in A or C, just B, is it still helpful?

It goes a bit like this. Most human actions have side effects in addition to their main purpose. Some we are aware of (and may trouble our subconscious), some we are dimly aware of (and brush aside), some we find out later (perhaps to our regret). Not being aware of them causes reactive behavior and goal confusion and reduces the power to act.

Increased awareness of them allows us tackle them effectively, but requires lot of brainpower most of us are unwilling to spend.

Meditation allows one to simplify a problem so one can see its dimensions clearly (less brainpower needed), then allows one to weigh solutions along with their side effects (to get an overall better solution).

@ruchir said it beautifully. Lets say you want to use meditation to improve your ability to market things better. What may end up happening is that, with better clarity and focus you may have gained from meditation, you will not only understand the true needs of your potential customers, but also the limitations of your product/solution. In the end you will feel compelled to do the right thing for your customers, instead of exploiting their ignorance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com