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Not everyone should meditate

joshcsimmons.com

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Re: Not everyone should meditate

#271

Post by unfocussed_mike »

People with OCD [0] should consider doing less meditation, IMO.

I find that meditation can lead me into rumination traps where I make no progress.

I sometimes have to set myself deadlines or checkpoints to make sure that I do not ruminate my way out of available time.

What I tend to need instead is breathing techniques to stay and cope within the moment, which I accept is like task-focussed micro-meditation in a way. But deliberate, long quiet meditation rarely helps me and it can make things worse.

[0] by which I mean the debilitating condition, not the pop-culture joke about pointing out pictures aren't straight or kerning on some signage is wrong

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#272

Post by argentinian »

cromd wrote: post #187
argentinian wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really do feel like I'm watching a pleasant movie filmed through my eyeballs. I was curious about this. You mean it feels as if you are a little person sitting inside your skull, watching the "you" movie? Or you meant something different?

Yep, that's what I mean. And movie maybe implies too much action/drama/plot... Maybe it's more like a surveillance camera! I'd say it's just a general dampening of predictions, emotions, and explanations. Instead of saying "I want my next job to be X", it's "I wonder what my next job will be". Instead of saying "I'm taking a walk to place Y", it's "I wonder where I'm walking to". Of course I can tell myself a destina…

What do you think about the idea of meditation being about temporarily stop reacting to the movie? As if the watcher is often very involved with what happens in the movie, but during meditation he lets go of the the involvement?

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#273

Post by mi3law »

Mo3 wrote: post #65

Can confirm from personal experience. Even a lot of vipassana meditation by itself can send you into psychotic states when you're not ready for all the insight yet. I came very close to psychosis once, experienced ego death, broke down mentally and had to spend 2 months in a depression ward. Cannot recommend. I don't regret the 2-3 months of active ego dissolution phase, life has never been more beautiful and strange…

I'm sorry you've had such difficult experiences. Does the following excerpt resonate with you? If so, I'd be happy to share more.

"This comment is extremely important and should be borne in mind by all who feel tempted to dabble with the psychedelic experience without knowing what they are doing or why. He who enters the fifth state of consciousness without preparation may be spiritually paralyzed by his experience. He has seen too much too soon and, as a result, all games become meaningless. He cannot play the life games that satisfy men in the third state of consciousness. He cannot play the Master Game because he knows nothing about it and has no teacher. So he becomes, like Daumal's "leaf in the wind," an even more helpless plaything of external forces than he was before his rash experiment."

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#274

Post by argentinian »

strken wrote: post #204
argentinian wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?

I don't meditate, but thoughts do just seem to appear to me without a lot of control or conscious effort. My answer is twofold. Firstly, your executive function is still moderating those thoughts, even if they're appearing from some dingy recess of your brain that decided to think about hunger or inkjet printers. Secondly, there's not really a "self" other than your executive function and the stuff going into it. Any…

Does the executive function operate in a deterministic way? In a random way? In a mixture of determinism and randomness?

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#275

Post by argentinian »

cardanome wrote: post #246
argentinian wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can feel like that when you resist the painful memory or emotion. But if you stay with it, accepting it, neither rejecting nor holding it, you may notice that it dissolves. It's like the effect of exposure in behavioral therapy, phobias are treated with sustained exposure to the feared stimulus.

The process is still painful. Yeah, I know how to accept them and don't resist but it's not like I will be able to sort out my issues in a 20min session. The best I can hope is to get to the deeper issues which will be even more painful. I personally found the combination of regular physical exercise plus reading physical books (training my concentration, helping me relaxing) the best way to stay productive. If I med…

The pain is painful, but finite. I wonder if keeping it buried deeply has our hasn't consequences.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#276

Post by sparks1970 »

cromd wrote: post #126
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, I've found my exploration of meditation and similar things has left me feeling less in control (in some ways, at least), less "me", and much less of what I expected from the outset. I suppose I expected the inverse, in a way... To feel more grounded, connected, and in touch with myself. Instead it seems I've only found that myself isn't what I thought it was. I suppose the most profound aspect is realizing…

Yeah, and I think all of this brings us closer to the truth as you say - that ultimately we are responding to cellular/electrical activity. I'm inclined to believe truth-finding is good overall, but we also have to buckle up for some weird stuff then. Sam Harris, while I never followed his meditation talk much, had one example recently that really drove home the "can't predict thought" concept. Something like "think…

As I have got older (I'm in my early 50's) I have gained the ability to step back from situations and think about them from all sides. Sometimes that makes me more mellow about it, not always.

I'm not much into meditation but I have had experiences that viscerally proved to me that I am not in full control of my actions.

In my late teens and early 20's I developed a social anxiety, paruresis, which made it impossible for me to urinate in the presence of strangers. I could stand at a urinal, I could will myself to go as much as I wanted, nothing would happen. It felt very much like being a passenger in my own body. Happily, I was able to use graduated exposure therapy to make this manageable.

With kids I've also seen a lot of storymaking. A child will have an impulse to do something and when you ask them why, they don't know but they make up a story for it. I strongly believe we all do this. We act on impulse and then tell ourselves stories to explain our motivations and maintain a coherent sense of self.

Back in the early 2000's researchers were doing experiments on rats to remote control them via brain stimulation https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-guide...

The ethical aspects aside, my intuition is that if you wired up a human being with something similar you could remote control them to go left, right, forward or back. Afterwards you could ask them about their behaviour and they would explain it with a story in terms of their own free choices and decisions.

We already know this to be true: Advertising.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#277

Post by Mo3 »

mi3law wrote: post #273
Mo3 wrote: post #65

Can confirm from personal experience. Even a lot of vipassana meditation by itself can send you into psychotic states when you're not ready for all the insight yet. I came very close to psychosis once, experienced ego death, broke down mentally and had to spend 2 months in a depression ward. Cannot recommend. I don't regret the 2-3 months of active ego dissolution phase, life has never been more beautiful and strange…

I'm sorry you've had such difficult experiences. Does the following excerpt resonate with you? If so, I'd be happy to share more. "This comment is extremely important and should be borne in mind by all who feel tempted to dabble with the psychedelic experience without knowing what they are doing or why. He who enters the fifth state of consciousness without preparation may be spiritually paralyzed by his experience.…

That resonates on a very deep level, yes. I've worked through most of it already.

I'm not sure exactly right now what this refers to as fifth state of consciousness, is it the eight circuit model of consciousness?

If so, as of the last dark night of the soul I seem to have reached permanent and stable access to sixth circuit now with glimpses of the seventh circuit, but I don't want to go there right now and proceeding further seems like it will take some time now anyway.

I hope to maintain the current state of mind until I have grown older, maybe even until I am able to stop working and focus on this path. I am quite happy with the current, fully integrated metaconsciousness.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#278

Post by kybernetikos »

sooheon wrote: post #258
Scarblac wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they "just happen", but they originate in ways that aren't accessible to consciousness. So to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me.

> to consciousness they suddenly appear, but it was still my brain that formed them, so me. Interesting philosophical position! I've rarely seen that position be held in earnest, because the obvious consequence is that you should be held fully responsible for anything possibly criminal you do while sleepwalking, as it was still on your brain's orders, regardless of your state of consciousness.

Our brains often cause us to do things we consider accidents, e.g. fumbling an egg. It's still me that has done it, and I am still responsible to clean up the mess. The fact that I didn't do it 'deliberately' doesn't negate my culpability and responsibility, although it may change its character.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#279

Post by Tetilio »

cromd wrote: post #107

For me, meditation started a fundamental shift in how I think about free will, and oddly nobody I've mentioned it to in real life has felt this. I used to feel very in-control of my own mind, but after intentionally sitting and monitoring for thoughts, labeling those thoughts, etc, I became sensitive to how thoughts can really come out of nowhere. You can't predict what you will think next. That strikes a little deep…

I'm not meditating and had the same thought/expiernce/revelation.

My direct thought (me) what I feel is me, is trying to influence the rest of me and it just not always work.

One theory is, that you are reading/expierincing what already happened (like subseconds ago) and you can only try to influence the upcoming behavior of your whole system.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#280

Post by zozbot234 »

argentinian wrote: post #268
brigandish wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buddhism is basically (basically) predicated on the idea, I don't see why it's horrible to acknowledge the possibility, especially if it could be true.

Buddhism says that an end of suffering is possible, so it predicates a different idea.

Buddhism also says that an end to suffering in this lifetime is incredibly rare, something that qualifies you not just as an arahant but as a full Buddha. The claim that full Buddhahood is possible is obviously interesting - it implies that meaningful developments in enlightenment are very possible even after the conventional four stages of awakening - but obviously it's something that can only be explored by arahants who have completed these four stages. (And there's enough controversy about even the mere existence of modern arahatship, so the claim that it might at some time become common enough to make further progress feasible is even more speculative!)
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