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Ten years of trying to meditate

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Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#121

Post by lpcrealmadrid »

abeppu wrote: post #58

So for 10 years, the author read some books, occasionally did sitting meditation but only briefly and not getting anywhere, took no classes, got guidance from no teachers, did no retreats, etc, and ends the piece with a teaser for the next article/email. I feel like if someone wrote that they wanted to understand computation, and over the course of 10 years they read Godel Escher Bach and some Smullyan puzzles, and o…

Author here. Yes exactly! Intellectually that is 100% correct. In practice, as many others in the discussion have remarked, sustaining a meditation practice past the initial barriers is hard (as is learning programming, btw). Everyone brings their own baggage. Mine was that I thought I should be able to do it all on my own. :shrugs: Not surprisingly, I had the same experience with computer science before finding a teacher + community.

Thanks for your comment, not a fan of the snark but the content is great.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#122

Post by taeric »

bowsamic wrote: post #117
taeric wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not literally zero effect. But I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of the effect is the same as how propaganda works. I take it as similar to inversion tables. Could it help some folks with their back pain? Absolutely. Does it do so for the reasons they put forward? Highly unlikely. (Acupuncture is similar. Homeopathy? Maybe...)

So you're claiming that it's mostly placebo? That is absurd to me. Why wouldn't sitting down and doing a specific mental activity for 30 minutes a day (e.g. paying attention to breath) change something? It seems very obvious to me that it would train the mind in some way. This is a genuinely bizarre take

No. Placebo is a different thing. Persuasion would be closer. And I welcome being wrong. But spirituality of all types rings very hollow to me.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#123

Post by bowsamic »

taeric wrote: post #122
bowsamic wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're claiming that it's mostly placebo? That is absurd to me. Why wouldn't sitting down and doing a specific mental activity for 30 minutes a day (e.g. paying attention to breath) change something? It seems very obvious to me that it would train the mind in some way. This is a genuinely bizarre take

No. Placebo is a different thing. Persuasion would be closer. And I welcome being wrong. But spirituality of all types rings very hollow to me.

Meditation isn't really a spiritual act though, it's simply a form of mental training. It is like learning, or doing puzzles, etc. Do you doubt those things?

The spiritual part is how to frame the results and shifts that come from long-term meditation in a helpful worldview.

Have you tried it by the way? It sounds like you aren't quite aware what it even is

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#124

Post by Enginerrrd »

bowsamic wrote: post #119
Enginerrrd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it came as a real shock to me at first. I had made many mistakes in my early meditation career. But I learned a lot more and suddenly started progressing. This was wonderful at first. I started to feel and experience some pretty mind-blowing things on the cushion at first and then extending well off the cushion into the rest of my life. Then... I remember random memories started to kind of pop into my awareness…

Yep, I've heard of multiple people with these exact symptoms. It's a very familiar story

Yes, I'm very secular. But the fact that these things happen with such regularity and there is remarkable consistency and precision in them really lends itself toward the religious interpretations. Also, the skeptic in me says it's unreliable, but those glimpses of actual visual light (flickering at first, then steady) coupled with feelings of (for lack of a better word) divinity, are still hard for me to reconcile with a purely secular interpretation.

One big takeaway I had was realizing that outside the west, these types of things are well known. Here though, it seems almost no one who purports to be a "teacher" knows much about them or what to do with them.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#125

Post by taeric »

bowsamic wrote: post #123
taeric wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Placebo is a different thing. Persuasion would be closer. And I welcome being wrong. But spirituality of all types rings very hollow to me.

Meditation isn't really a spiritual act though, it's simply a form of mental training. It is like learning, or doing puzzles, etc. Do you doubt those things? The spiritual part is how to frame the results and shifts that come from long-term meditation in a helpful worldview. Have you tried it by the way? It sounds like you aren't quite aware what it even is

For those that are neither spiritual nor meditative, they are both far away in thought.

I have tried meditation before. Never did a weekend retreat, but used to do guided classes. They left me a bit high and dry. And they felt exactly the same as old religious acquaintances on how that helps guide and inform. I /do not/ doubt that it works for the folks it works for. I clearly have doubts that it is a general thing that even can work for everyone.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#126

Post by bowsamic »

taeric wrote: post #125
bowsamic wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meditation isn't really a spiritual act though, it's simply a form of mental training. It is like learning, or doing puzzles, etc. Do you doubt those things? The spiritual part is how to frame the results and shifts that come from long-term meditation in a helpful worldview. Have you tried it by the way? It sounds like you aren't quite aware what it even is

For those that are neither spiritual nor meditative, they are both far away in thought. I have tried meditation before. Never did a weekend retreat, but used to do guided classes. They left me a bit high and dry. And they felt exactly the same as old religious acquaintances on how that helps guide and inform. I /do not/ doubt that it works for the folks it works for. I clearly have doubts that it is a general thing t…

Anyone who sits and keeps their mind on a single object for 30 mins a day will eventually experience _some_ kind of effect from it.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#127

Post by Hasu »

bowsamic wrote: post #116
Hasu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's even more tons of research showing positive effects from meditation. Meditation research generally is low quality, as is suffers from lack of defined methodology, lack of a consensus definition of what meditation is, and the general subjective experience of meditation. (Concretely, if you want to do brain scans on someone meditating, how do you know they're actually meditating? This extends to scans on people…

So you stand by the assertion that meditation has no negative effects?

I never claimed that.

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#128

Post by [deleted] »

bowsamic wrote: post #115
Hasu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't good evidence suggesting anything is "100% completely safe", but yes, the vast majority of meditation research shows mild positive benefits for practitioners, and the medical consensus is that meditation is perfectly safe for healthy individuals. It feels a lot like the goalposts are being moved here, the original claim was that meditation is extremely dangerous unless you're doing Buddhism right, now we'…

No, the original claim is that meditation _can_ be dangerous unless you are doing Buddhism right. You are claiming that if meditation had dangers, it would be trivially easy to find data about it, and thus it doesn't. We aren't claiming it's always dangerous, we are claiming that it can be if traditional advice is ignored. You are the one shifting the goalposts. Re-read the thread and reflect

[deleted]

Re: Ten years of trying to meditate

#130

Post by taeric »

bowsamic wrote: post #126
taeric wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that are neither spiritual nor meditative, they are both far away in thought. I have tried meditation before. Never did a weekend retreat, but used to do guided classes. They left me a bit high and dry. And they felt exactly the same as old religious acquaintances on how that helps guide and inform. I /do not/ doubt that it works for the folks it works for. I clearly have doubts that it is a general thing t…

Anyone who sits and keeps their mind on a single object for 30 mins a day will eventually experience _some_ kind of effect from it.

Strictly, this is almost certainly false. If only because there is a ridiculously wide range of the ways that people think.

Loosening it to most people, I mean, maybe? But then why does the nature of what you focus your thought onto matter? I suppose the mechanism is that you are effectively forcing a wiring of whatever in your mind is responsible for consciousness? Makes sense that you can effectively train your consciousness by rote in much the same way that you can train your arms/hands to juggle.

But, at this point, we have to establish that consciousness is the same between us. Certainly plausible. I'd go so far as to say likely. But not guaranteed.

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