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Not everyone should meditate

joshcsimmons.com

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Re: Not everyone should meditate

#321

Post by kragen »

avgcorrection wrote: post #287
verve_rat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been entire monasteries full of people who spend many hours a day meditating for thousands of years. They don't seem to be mentally unhealthy on the whole, Not to be snarky (ok maybe a little), but they do believe in unprovable beings on some "higher" plane of existence...

You just called billions of people mentally unhealthy. Not so much snarky as unnecessarily mean.

It is one of the basic tenets of Buddhism† that humans are constantly deluding themselves and doing self-defeating things. In modern terms, you could say they are all mentally ill. This is asserted of humans in general, not just those who meditate a lot.

It's unnecessarily mean if it's not true or, arguably, if there's nothing they can do about it. But if it's true and there's something they can do about it, then not saying it is being unnecessarily mean.

The Buddhist prescription for how to get better (from common garden-variety self-delusion, not schizophrenia) is called the Noble Eightfold Path, and a large dose of meditation occupies an important place in it. Other important ingredients traditionally include material renunciation, strict nonviolence, celibacy, abstinence from alcohol, honesty, politeness, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path

______

† And, arguably, Christianity.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#322

Post by avindroth »

subpixel wrote: post #79
avindroth wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a common enough effect that it should be noted. Many spiritual people end up being detached from the world, for better or worse.

Detachment is a tenet of Buddhism, not an effect of meditation.

So no part of buddhism is about healthy re-integration into society? That seems troubling.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#323

Post by agumonkey »

skilled wrote: post #20

This is a great perspective. I know what the author means with it, too. I spent 5 years in daily meditation practice (twice a day for 20 minutes) and it completely altered my state of mind. I was a naturally introverted person when I started, though I believe that meditation really stepped it up a notch for me. The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends y…

Yeah it feels like living in a hospital bubble to maximize health. I'd think we need to blend meditative view points (ability to keep some distance, to cool down) with normal daily lives.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#324

Post by JacobThreeThree »

kranner wrote: post #89
JacobThreeThree wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat as you. I think there's a lot we don't know about human psychology, the brain and self-help practices, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that meditation works. This 2017 publication sums it up nicely: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691617709589

The paper you've linked to ( https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589 ) points out methodological flaws in meditation-related research, ambiguities in the meaning of "mindfulness" etc.; it doesn't set out to prove that meditation doesn't 'work' (in the sense that it causes no effects). In fact the paper acknowledges instances of meditation-induced adverse effects; if meditation didn't do anything a…

If the definitions of the key terms and concepts in meditation is ambiguous, the body of scientific evidence of meditation doing anything is not particularly convincing.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#325

Post by cbfrench »

zozbot234 wrote: post #69
cbfrench wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that vipassana isn’t a serious and intense contemplative discipline. If I did, that certainly wasn’t my intent. At least in St. John’s use of the term, it’s a spiritual and even existential desolation that leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love through the apophatic way. As such, it represents a fairly advanced stage in the spiritual life. I’m not sure if this is the same way the t…

> leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very…

Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#326

Post by zozbot234 »

cbfrench wrote: post #325
zozbot234 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leads ultimately to a radical purifying of love Yes, this can be directly paralleled with the jhana of equanimity, which canonically follows the Dark Night. ("Equanimity" itself being the fourth vipassana jhana, whereas the "Dark Night" is essentially a feature of the transition from the second and/or third to the fourth vipassana jhana. The consistently "apophatic" character is hopefully clear enough from the very…

Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!

AIUI, it seems that Daniel Ingram has cautiously endorsed the work of well-known Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts as potentially a useful take on stream entry/enlightenment and related things from a theistic, and specifically Christian tradition.

(I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, with very obscure paraphrases such as "Buddha-Nature"; perhaps out of wishing to avert conflation with the much more clearly theistic-leaning Hinduist tradition - it's clear enough to me that such a well established tradition as Christian contemplative prayer has to be doing something useful for its practitioners, and it makes sense to ask ourselves what might be happening there, and how it might work at a basic level!)

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#327

Post by kragen »

zozbot234 wrote: post #326
cbfrench wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. I will check out Ingram’s book. This sounds like an interesting and fruitful appropriation of the mystical term. Thanks for the explanation!

AIUI, it seems that Daniel Ingram has cautiously endorsed the work of well-known Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts as potentially a useful take on stream entry/enlightenment and related things from a theistic, and specifically Christian tradition. (I'd like to stress the point that no matter what one's stance on the basic question of theism - which to be fair, is only ever referenced very obliquely by Buddhism, wit…

Fairly extensive sections of the Tipitaka deal with the existence and nature of superhuman beings and attribute Hindu explicitly theist beliefs to encounters with them. I don't think it's true that Buddhism only ever references it very obliquely or that it conflates deities with the Buddha-nature. But my understanding is very limited, so you could be right.

I think it's true that Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners, but not for the reason you give. Your argument rests on a flawed premise: minimally, that any tradition at least as well established as Christian contemplative prayer does something useful for its practitioners. Traditions better established include alcoholism, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and death. Your argument would prove that all three of these traditions also do something useful for their practitioners, but I think almost everyone would disagree with regard to at least one of them.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#328

Post by jamiek88 »

sparks1970 wrote: post #276
cromd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Split brain patients will do something similar making up a story for why one side of the body did something unexpected.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#329

Post by avgcorrection »

kragen wrote: post #321
avgcorrection wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just called billions of people mentally unhealthy. Not so much snarky as unnecessarily mean.

It is one of the basic tenets of Buddhism† that humans are constantly deluding themselves and doing self-defeating things. In modern terms, you could say they are all mentally ill. This is asserted of humans in general , not just those who meditate a lot. It's unnecessarily mean if it's not true or, arguably, if there's nothing they can do about it. But if it's true and there's something they can do about it, then no…

Thank you for that irrelevant reply.

Re: Not everyone should meditate

#330

Post by davorak »

redisman wrote: post #184
davorak wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is my impression as well. An ultra marathon is not a walk around the block even if they both commonly involve moving your legs.

Moving your legs might not be for everyone!

Yes but walking is rarely the cause that issue.

'Walking is not for everyone' and 'Exercise is not for everyone' is technically true since it is going to do more harm than good for a small subsection of society.

It is even more true that some people should not run marathons or ultra marathons, but it would be odd to notice that then write an article based on that evidence that 'walking is not for everyone' rather than 'marathons are not for every one'. And when I have read of serious consequences of meditation it is from doing the equivalent, or more than, an ultra marathon, but then the conclusion is the equivalent of 'walking is not for everyone'.

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