The new science of meditation

I think that there needs to be a separation of meditation's tangible benefits from both the religious associations, such as seeking nirvana or psychedelic experiences, and the social & financial ones stated in this article that either view meditation as a genuine secret superpower or are see it as a backdrop to take advantage of people simply trying to find mental peace.

My belief is that the idea Kabat-Zinn had, which is paraphrased in the article, is good. "Pay attention to the present moment, on purpose, without judgment" - stop, take some time to reflect on your feelings, process them. Maybe just take some time and not "think", where you give yourself some away time from the world. The anecdata from countless people seems to vaguely support the notion that this view on meditation works; I wouldn't call it concrete by any means, but it's as solid of a scientific start as one can get with something like meditation.

Software developers and those adjacent love to tout acronyms like "Keep It Simple, Stupid", why does the buck stop at software? The further one gets into the article, the more outlandish things get: electronic stimulation, microdosing various drugs (mentioned a lot on HN, which I've always found disturbing), cranial ultrasounds, even the stock photo of the lady meditating with a VR headset?

At the end of the piece, Laukkonen provides the following rhetorical question: "[W]hat is liberating about chasing different states of consciousness, and not enjoying the one that you have?" I think a lot of the comments here and the research presented towards the end of the article are in too deep in either side and are unable to see the forest for the trees.

You're welcome! I realized I'd be remiss in not mentioning David Hinton as well: he's an American poet who's also a professional Chinese translator and has produced many excellent translations[0] over the years. He has a very distinct translation style were he translates as much of it as directly as possible (which is already difficult going from Ancient Chinese to Modern Chinese, let alone English) and really helps you get how different the thought really is while still keeping the originals poetic quality.

[0] I recommend his translations of the inner Chuang Tzu chapters and the I-Ching, as well as his book China Root.

> One of the aims of mediation is to gradually understand that this self is really an illusion

Yes this is a standard Buddhist (and not even exclusively Buddhist) point, and I'd say it's basically correct, but the problem is that it can, and has been understood in dozens of ways. Some more profound than others, and plenty contradicting one another.

Let me give a fairly psychological interpretation. One of our major cognitive functions is to create and maintain an automatic, pre-verbal map of the world, at the center of which stands a mapped entity labeled "ME". Let's call it the "self-representation". This is in itself fine and dandy, and quite useful; it gives us a sense of being an integrated organism through time, and lets us say things like "yesterday I went swimming". More troublingly, it's also the subject of our self-esteem, and of most of our hopes and worries.

The map, with our self-representation in the center, is not the only thing in our awareness - we're also able to attend to stimula and feel our emotions in the here and now. The problem, and the only problem as far as radical Buddhism is concerned, is that our sense of being is most of the time entirely fused with this self-representation. It becomes the entirely of who I am to myself. (Hence Ramana Maharshi's super direct path: inquire within "who am I").

What meditation does, by slowing down the whole mechanism, is to allow us to feel that there is more to me, here and now, than this running self-representation. By insistently putting our attention away from it, we temporally and partially unfuse from the self-representation. We get little breaks from it, where it either it mostly just stops for a while, or it becomes something I see happening, rather than something I am. And if I can see it happening, I can also train myself to not give it so much importance.

The result is a much vaster inner perspective, and a sense of deeper presence - for a few moments at least. But, usually, the moment the meditator notices these changes happening, the most automatic reaction is for the self-representation to rise back up as the one who wants to own that. HEY, INTERESTING STUFF IS HAPPENING TO ME!!! And there you go go crashing again into stuffy ordinary consciousness.

Hence the usual advice you will hear from good meditation teachers: getting experiences if often easy, but not running after them can take years and years of practice.

I like how you qualified that with "Just" :)

Fair comment, and I appreciate you clarifying, I'll check out the translation you mentioned :)