51–60 of 83 posts
Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters. Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
I wish more people talked about this
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Correct, but if the goal is to make workers more productive, motivated, etc, then meditation may not be the right tool to use. There are other, more effective methods.
Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters. Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
As someone who grew up in a western Buddhist community (and skimmed the article), this rings true to me. I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools. There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once yo…
Where could you learn it though? Grown up typically Dutch, I learned Tonglen by reading search inside yourself. Other than your comment, I never came across it.
The very meaning of mindfulness is to detach from the self, and to do each and every task no matter how mundane it is as if brand new at each and every moment. Kind of like to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour --so to say. So though the mundaneness of everything is quite real, the absolute newness of every moment is just as apparen…
No, you don't want to detach from the self. The point of mindfulness is to see that concept of an independent, separate self, separate from everything else is an illusion and we are interconnected. You are still you, but part of a bigger system.
When Cartesius said his famous "Cogito ergo sum" that's pretty much what it meant - you can be sure that your mind exists, but not much else beyond that.
And, if you think about it, why would everything in the world be interconnected in some meaningfull way? For what we know universe is just a big bag of energy and particles interacting with each other in the random way. "It's all connected" is a cry from the human mind desperately trying to make sense out of chaos.
On a meaningless task under laboratory conditions. Maybe mindfulness just gave them some perspective on how pointless it was. I don't see how this is relevant to the real workplace where stress can be paralyzing and burnout is a greater threat to productivity and motivation than being chill is.
> Maybe mindfulness just gave them some perspective on how pointless it was. "One hundred and one Amazon Mechanical Turk workers whose location was set to the United States took part in exchange for $1.35 each."
My experience is that concentration directed meditation is more like a tool. You can use concentrative skills to advance towards direction you want in the life. You are in control. If you do awareness oriented practice long enough, it starts to work on you. You are on the ride 'to the unknown'. Motivations change and unless you make nessesary changes in your life, you lose motivation and have life chrisis. Usual solu…
>Many people have romantic notion of transcendence and enlightement, but when meditation starts to really work they realize that's not what they actually want. Change is scary. Interesting. Would you care to share an example of this?
Felt like when something triggery came up, I knew how I was going to respond and then I didn't... and haven't always been sure what else was appropriate. Relearning who I want to be is interesting / challenging / confusing.
Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters. Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
The trend is to take a practice completely out of context, and completely out of the spirit of what it was introduced and intended for, and use it a cheap prop to be more efficient in an ill world.