21–30 of 111 posts
What you direct when you pay attention. What you concentrate when you concentrate. What gets jerked around when you are distracted.
(As opposed to "Mind", synonymous with "intellect", which is not what they mean. Call it a bad translation)
Meditation is about quieting ones mind to ultimate stillness. This is where the ego disolves which is not exactly in alignment with the culturally dominant materialism that we find surrounding us (i.e. the quest for money power and status) all things that rely on an inflated ego. Using meditation to improve in moving up in society is like using wood logs to put out a fire.
Another version of nirvana brings back the learnings to other humans and help alleviate their suffering.
Ego inflation causes a lot of the suffering for sure, but you can’t function as a human without ego either. To deny it is to deny humanity, to escape into a baby or animal like state.
On the other hand spiritual inflation (i.e bypass) of this sort can be just as bad; ego evolved because it was evolutionarily adaptive (despite having massive failure modes). You can meditate in complete peace only if you free ride others taking care of business of the real world.
Sati also means to remember, anamnesis in Plato’s terms. Among many, to remember who you are; not a god, not a devil, a human that evolved into consciousness and now has to reconcile the upstairs and the downstairs of reality with your fallacious cognitive machinery the best way you can.
This is kind of unrelated but whenever discussions on meditation come up here, especially recently ones that have mentioned the dangers around it, I am reminded that my lineage stresses that meditation should not be undertaken until one has sufficient preparation with simpler practices, such as karma yoga (service orientated worship). The perspective is that if you start these practices before "calming down" (like be…
How well has this been replicated? Has a non-buddhist person ever been able to demonstrate similar feats?
It's such an astounding claim. I want to believe, but am still skeptical because it just so astounding.
This is kind of unrelated but whenever discussions on meditation come up here, especially recently ones that have mentioned the dangers around it, I am reminded that my lineage stresses that meditation should not be undertaken until one has sufficient preparation with simpler practices, such as karma yoga (service orientated worship). The perspective is that if you start these practices before "calming down" (like be…
I’ve practiced meditation for over a decade with many, many traditions in and out of Buddhism and never heard of this concern. Not arguing that meditation can’t have downsides, but I think you’re way over exaggerating them.
Here[1] is a recent HN discussion about an article[2] about just this. And here[3] is an earlier discussion about a similar article[4].
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890790
[2] - https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11752317
[4] - http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-k...
"In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures f…
It looks like he can control his immune response too.
This is kind of unrelated but whenever discussions on meditation come up here, especially recently ones that have mentioned the dangers around it, I am reminded that my lineage stresses that meditation should not be undertaken until one has sufficient preparation with simpler practices, such as karma yoga (service orientated worship). The perspective is that if you start these practices before "calming down" (like be…
(like what's an engineer but a man who uses his awareness like a hammer, beating riddles into submission?)
Learning to use your awareness intelligently strikes me as close to an unalloyed good thing. Meditation can do that.
David Chapman has a whole (long, elaborate) theory about this:
https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism
(actually I guess you could spend several days tracking down all of the different pieces of this account that Chapman has written across his several web sites!)
The article's author, smugly waits to reveal his wokeness until the very last paragraph. Apart from that, it's mainly rubbish. "This ahistorical reinterpretation of Buddhism can certainly seem like a breath of fresh air to the modern white, upper-middle class Westerner, who, disillusioned with the Christianity or the Judaism of her upbringing, is still not fully satisfied with what our secular culture has to offer."
Kind of riffing off of that, I think that there would be less atheists in America if more of them were exposed to Hinduism.
The interesting part about these religions is that unlike two other prominent major religions (Christianity and Islam), they rarely prostelytize or seek converts.
If they were as gung-ho about trying to spread their religion as Christianity has, for example, there'd probably be a lot more Hindus and Buddhists.
Incidentally, belief in a god is not absolutely necessary for either religion, since both Hinduism and Buddhism have atheistic flavors (and theistic ones too, before someone jumps in and claims that Buddhism is always atheistic).
"In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures f…