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Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

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Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#141

Post by raymondh »

neltnerb wrote: post #22

True Story. I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar). When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and…

Over my career, I've also seen some variations of this theme.

A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contrast, the stress-reduction instructors were a wreck.

A friend and I used to go out to eat on a regular basis. He reasonably decided to change his diet to more healthy foods. For all I know, it did improve his health, but I did observe that at a ball game, he opted for a hamburger and then his body rebelled. He had lost the ability to eat commonplace foods.

Among meditators (of which I was one), I observed a heighten sensitivity to being knocked off kilter by anything or anyone that conflicted with the world view of the practitioner.

My friends who were into body building routinely lifted weights for many hours a week, but when suitcases or scuba tanks need to be carried, there a was strong aversion. I surmised that the unbalanced loads greatly threw-off how they had trained themselves to lift weights with good form.

Among Python programmers who use Black and isort in order to improve the appearance of code, it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable. Likewise, it is common to become highly judgmental of people who don't use that tooling (and even more so with type annotations where proponents seem to have an almost religious fervor).

I don't really know what conclusion to draw from these events, but there is something of interest going on.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#142

Post by neltnerb »

reom_tobit wrote: post #131
neltnerb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with this specific concept is that lots and lots of people are lazy and instead of doing compassionate things, they "feel compassion" as a generic emotion through the use of meditation. I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in…

This has broadly been my experience of secular meditation also, I haven’t explored any other schools. What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”. I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.

Yes, something about living in the moment and responding skillfully and helpfully naturally. Doing those things naturally is what takes practice, you just don't get practice exercising those compassion-action responses if you only do mantras in your own home and it remains entirely theoretical.

I suppose it's fair that in some senses "enlightenment" is orthogonal to "being good" if you use some systems of analysis. By that logic monks sequestered in a monastery are doing something important (?) even if there's little measurable impact of their work on the world around them. I have issues with that logic, I think "to whom" is important and if the answer is "to the person doing it" I'm not sure compassion is really the right adjective anymore.

Of course, translation challenges abound in this area of discussion.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#143

Post by kibwen »

criticaltinker wrote: post #19
id wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it good to not care?

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” - Alan Watts

Quite often I find that Man suffers only because a second Man finds joy in the suffering of the first. Detachment will serve you well in alleviating the suffering that would otherwise arise from the uncaring, undirected whims of the universe, but will leave you unprepared at dealing with willful and directed malice.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#144

Post by roflc0ptic »

neltnerb wrote: post #67
roflc0ptic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well - how many of them did you need to help you? Something like this occurred at my buddhist temple during a meditation, except it was one of the members who collapsed. Someone went over help and the rest of us... couldn't do anything more. An ambulance was called. they got medical treatment. Should we have collectively wrung our hands? To what end? The point here isn't averting your eyes in the face of suffering, i…

I didn't expect everyone to jump into action and mill around pointlessly, I expected them to pause long enough to help me, a newcomer to town, contact people who were trained to help... And to be clear, I mean this as an example and a warning to not get too disconnected from the physical world while doing these meditations. They were all as friendly of people as any others I met in a city, it was the context that mad…

Oh. It sounded like that’s what you were describing - somebody came to help, and most everyone else ignored it

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#145

Post by nprateem »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #121
nprateem wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent a few years meditating most mornings and evenings and I'd hoped for more. No fireworks no bliss... feels like I'm not making much progress. But I've read about enough people experiencing much more I wonder where I'm going wrong

All the teachers I practiced with repeated to me: don't look for something special. Don't look for bliss. If bliss comes, don't pay attention to it. Bliss is not the aim of this meditation. I don't know what meditation you are practicing, and there are so many of them I wouldn't be able to give any advice that would work with your own practice. So I can't know if you are doing something wrong. What I know, however, i…

Have you read MCTB? I feel I'm still in stage 1, maybe 2, but definitely haven't reached the arising and passing away... Still, I find labelling useful. Going to try to find a Mahasi retreat

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#146

Post by neltnerb »

raymondh wrote: post #141
neltnerb wrote: post #22

True Story. I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar). When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and…

Over my career, I've also seen some variations of this theme. A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contras…

Oh, thanks for this insight, it's a useful one to me.

I would totally believe that it was more an unpracticed response while in a relaxed and learning state of mind than anyone's actual underlying meanness, these were nice folks as far as I could tell otherwise. That one situation was just astoundingly weird.

And indeed, it wasn't a person in the class that responded, it was an assistant who had done the material many times. The teacher didn't seem to know what to do either, I think it may be as you say that the assistant just happened to be in a "run the stuff" state of mind rather than a "teach" or "listen/contemplate" state of mind.

That definitely would explain a lot, a mental context switch takes a significant amount of time and meditation absolutely can do that. It would also explain why I felt like a bit of an alien bringing it to anyone's attention, I had arrived ten minutes late from another activity so I wasn't "in the zone" yet.

At least, I've yet to hear a better explanation. I've attributed it to long ingrained habits showing up in class because in no other location with the same group (edit: not the same people, the same organization) did I encounter something similar. But that can certainly be coincidence.

I did point this disconnect out to the class, and I think any Buddhist would not take awareness of this response as a criticism rather than an observation and opportunity to improve. If any of us were perfect there'd be no need for a class in the first place.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#147

Post by btheshoe »

any article based on a single study, especially when related to psychology or the social sciences, is more likely than not to be untrue. Worth taking this with study with a massive grain of salt. Replication crisis is real and most severe in this field.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#148

Post by biztos »

curuinor wrote: post #75
zozbot234 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the West doesn't have its own meditative and contemplative traditions. The Cynics and Stoics of the Classical world could have very diverse attitudes to wealth and material comforts, with the former being quite more disdainful of them and quite literally "living like dogs". We see the same thing in Western ascetic monasticism later on - some Western monks and nuns focus on helping others and doing their…

and seneca the stoic had 300 million sestertii total net worth, compared to the ordinary yearly wage of 200 sestertii, give or take! lots of rich religious folks out there in history. when they expropriated the buddhists in the huichang expropriation during the tang, they took tens of millions of acres of arable land and liberated 150,000 temple slaves

> when they expropriated the buddhists in the huichang expropriation during the tang…

Do you happen to have any good links for learning more about this?

The Wikipedia page[0] is a mess and my Google skills have fallen short.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huichang_Persecution_of_Buddhi...

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#149

Post by Klinky »

zozbot234 wrote: post #138
SMAAART wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forefront? HA! My experience is diametrically opposite: prolong Buddhism practice often leads to ego-centric behaviors that are swept under the rug and not talked about. I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my…

Buddhist vipassana meditation is based on deconstructing the ego altogether as well as all desires, and recognizing the illusion behind them. So if people are being egocentric, they probably have not progressed very far in their spiritual path.

That honestly just sounds like mental self-flagellation done to inflate the ego and feel superior.

Re: Emerging evidence that mindfulness can sometimes increase selfish tendencies

#150

Post by vmception »

neltnerb wrote: post #102
vmception wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and how do you act after no longer being newly moved to San Francisco? that incident was imprinted in you, but how has it worked out for you since? my guess: you failed to learn anything because of course that focused seminar doesn't teach anything related to the kind of mental health emergencies that occur on San Francisco streets, and so thats a decent crutch for you to lean on to not engage with them yourself, ove…

Putting a few numbers in your phone is something I did and would recommend to others in whatever city is relevant. These can of course come in handy regardless of whether you practice mindfulness meditation. My point was that the context of a class on loving-kindness was especially jarring. I fully advocate for everyone to take a class on basic first aid and know who to contact in response to a few basic classes of e…

People in the class kind of like this stereotype that @OverheardLA was making fun of the other day?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ccyfo9RBcSJ/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M...

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