161–170 of 335 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you define that "us", the self?
I believe in individuality; we aren't all one, other people exist, etc. Understanding oneself is the whole point of one's life so it can't really be defined. Knowledge is more than definitions. The self is more than the body and the mind at least. Those are my personal beliefs anyways.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, it's like Hume said. If your actions and thoughts depend on past events and biological and environmental stimulus, they are not free, they are conditioned, they are a reaction to past experience. And the alternative would be random actions, and random is not free, it's random.
That makes a good distinction. Is he taking one side or the other though? Seems to me like deterministic != free, and random also != free. So maybe nothing is free?
But you may define "free" differently.
The argument here seems to be that LSD can be dangerous, meditation is kind of like LSD, and therefore meditation can be dangerous. It does seem like a possibility, but you'd think if someone were going to write about it they'd try to present evidence of some sort to support the point.
Changing your psychological state is something all of us do every day, and some people have problems with just doing that. Experimenting with it substantially has the capacity to damage, and it's reasonable to conclude that for some subset of the population, for whatever reasons, it is not a hood idea. I think that's the point of the article
Every culture has forms of meditation, for example some prayers that christian monks do are mindfulness meditation. See David Fontana's "The Meditator's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Eastern and Western Meditation Techniques" for a overview of many forms of meditations across cultures.
One thing that is not emphasized enough about meditation is to explore why you want to meditate, what you expect out of it. Different answers to that questions will lead to different practices. My understanding though is that if done in an intensive manner, all forms of meditation converge and have side effects.
Finding a good teacher is important, the issue is to how... There is no easy answer, but there is a lot of information online, do your homework about particular practices and what to expect, their risks, etc... and trust your gut instincts. Don't take red flags lightly, talk to friend and family, see a professional if in doubt.
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…
> The strange thing about meditation and the idea of living in the present is that it completely transcends your life experience. It is not in human nature to fight with the inner workings of your own psychology, and for me - meditation really amplified all that I had been trough or was going through at the time. I really don't understand why the world just accepts that meditation as a whole is not just another versi…
However, be careful to not "throw out the baby with the bathwater". Ignoring obvious woo-woo claims and just focusing on documented Health Benefits is the right way to approach it. Others have posted some useful links from NIH/NCCIH which gives you some good starting points for study.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them. This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first. Source: started meditating a few months ago.
If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?
I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name).
He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that.
As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me".
When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me.
What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts".
To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix.
For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time.
Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol.
What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word).
It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the picture is a little more complicated than that. 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, though there are some exceptions. So it's evidently not the kind of thing where a continuous overdose will leave your mind or your body disabled; on the contrary, the meditators tend to live lo…
> 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...
One of the most popular belief systems today posits that incorporeal consciousnesses with names like "California", "Ukraine", and "Google" are the causes of most everyday events, although when you investigate sufficiently you always find that whatever physical doing is attributed to "California" or "Google" is actually done by an ordinary, corporeal human being, like a Scooby-Doo villain. Nevertheless, people adhering to this belief system commonly become very angry when you claim that "Google" exists only in their imaginations.
Coincidentally Mingyur Rinpoche just posted a talk about this as well [1]. I think the most important thing is to find a lineage to practice under, with texts that can support that practice. As much as people want to divorce it from it's historical context, meditation is part of a spiritual practice and communities of people have ways of teaching it in particular ways for a reason. No one should just go sit with zero…
>No one should just go sit with zero context and no support. C'mon now. It's not hang-gliding or dropping acid, it's sitting quietly in a room. Not everything in life should be treated as if it's horrendously risky or can't possibly be understood by people exercising common sense. Nor, in my opinion, do the agglomeration of various meditative practices and teachings, no matter how old and "sacred" they may theoretica…
My personal anecdote - I developed a difficult-to-control, anxiety-inducing thought* while dabbling in meditation a couple of years ago. I experienced a week or two worth of extreme anxiety, and had a panic attack. To this day, the obsessive thought is still with me and causes occasional distress. I can't say with certainty that the meditation practice was the cause, but the timing coincides, and I've never experienced anything like this prior to the meditation practice.
* not exactly a thought, but I'm not quite sure what to call it. It's more of an involuntary, difficult-to-control channeling of my focus/perception toward sensations which I perceive as uncomfortable and disturbing.
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…
Do you consider that there's a "you", a self, apart from what you call your life?
To the ~5 people I've described that to, they mostly show some kind of alarm, like they didn't realize I held such dangerous views. I guess in some people the same worldview might manifest as a sociopath personality that excuses reckless behavior, or a person with no drive that wastes their days away. In my case, I'm hypersensitive about harming people, I'm fairly risk averse, and I'm borderline obsessed with keeping high "productivity".
I often tell myself I'm smart and that I deserve my very comfortable life, but I also have to wonder if something about my brain chemistry or environment makes me enjoy reading HN and coding all day, while others hate that. So I do find the narrative shifts from "I accomplished X because I decided to" and becomes "I spent time on X, and I'm glad that happened, it was fun, and I'm glad I find that fun".
I hope I'm not getting too off topic given the original article. Self/consciousness/free-will debates can go on forever, so my ideal outcome is somebody says "yeah, that is pretty weird, pretty magical, oh well!". But more often it's met with "ah, don't be so negative, you can control yourself, if you try!".