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Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

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Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#31

Post by hacker_9 »

amelius wrote: post #24
hacker_9 wrote: post #9

I started meditating about 2 years ago because I liked the idea of having better 'control of my mind' - at the time I thought it was a gimmick but to my surprise it actually works. To begin with I found that after 20-30mins of closing my eyes and trying to think of nothing, I always came out of the session feeling a lot calmer. Fast forward to today and I can now isolate thoughts and throw them away if they are garba…

Very interesting. What timespan did you need to start seeing good results? Are you still improving after 2 years?

Not very long at all. You'll notice a positive feeling even after your first session. I have a lot of room to improve but there really is no end. Really you just learn more about yourself and how fast your brain is always working as it jumps between memories. You see how it focuses, and observe how certain thoughts drift in and set off a cascade of reactions and so on.

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#32

Post by MichaelGG »

gammafactor wrote: post #20
nota_bene wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> happiness is kinda pointless and ephemeral Ephemeral? Yes. Pointless? No: If you are happier, you'll make people around you happier. If everybody tries to achieve that, we'll have a much saner society. Thus, we should take it as our responsibility to achieve a good level of happiness as often as possible (obviously not by making others pay for it).

The idea here (that one gradually slips into with meditation or other mystical systems) is that there is no "You". Happy, sad, You, other people, all these "things" don't really exist, they're all illusions, mind constructs, artificial. Once you see the world for what it really is (a dream), all the masks fall away and you're free to go on with your "life" unencumbered by artificial thought creations that another art…

Is there a school of meditation that is in line with what reality actually is and recognizes minds as the result of real physical processes?

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#33

Post by goldfeld »

benihana wrote: post #12
dominotw wrote: post #3

Why do people do all these strange things? To make more money with "better brain" ?

To be happy. I don't do meditation (and in fact get kind of irritated that practitioners of it seem to imply the only way to get in more control of your brain is through meditation), but I practice CBT. The idea is to be in greater control of your conscious and subconscious processes by being more aware of what's going on in your brain. For example, I noticed that when people make suggestions on products I work on th…

Actually you do meditation. Just because "science" finally acknowledged and formalized the power of doing what your second paragraph describes, it doesn't stop being precisely what Buddhism has advocated for millennia with insight/vipassana meditation. You actually don't have to sit down in lotus position (or lie in bed) to practice meditation, that's but a convenient time and setting of intensive practice, but the goal is to have meditation be an all-encompassing activity permeating your life.

Many techniques of contemporary dance, for example, are meditation. They teach you to be aware of your full body in motion, fiber by fiber stretching and contracting, moment by moment. It's meditating on bodily impulses, not consciousness ones, but a trained dancer in action has in any case no consciousness of anything else but her body, rhythm and the abstract meaning (i.e. the image) of that, but those three get dissolved into one in dopamine and that's what people call "incorporating", you lose the sense of self.

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#34

Post by hacker_9 »

chrismealy wrote: post #29
hacker_9 wrote: post #9

I started meditating about 2 years ago because I liked the idea of having better 'control of my mind' - at the time I thought it was a gimmick but to my surprise it actually works. To begin with I found that after 20-30mins of closing my eyes and trying to think of nothing, I always came out of the session feeling a lot calmer. Fast forward to today and I can now isolate thoughts and throw them away if they are garba…

You can really nix unhappy thoughts? How can I do this too?

This stuff is hard to explain textually as it's more about feelings you have, but if I were to try.. during meditation bad memories will enter your focus and set off a cascade of negative reactions. But the deeper into the meditation you are the harder it is to shake your focus. Instead you end up observing these patterns of thoughts and how they evoke one another. Your let them have their moment in the sun and then they fade into the background as they failed to provoke you. Some stuff I've read suggests that the brain also may rewire these memories to permanently have less of an emotional impact. After many sessions you literally have to go out of your way to bring these memories back up!

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#35

Post by hosh »

amelius wrote: post #24
hacker_9 wrote: post #9

I started meditating about 2 years ago because I liked the idea of having better 'control of my mind' - at the time I thought it was a gimmick but to my surprise it actually works. To begin with I found that after 20-30mins of closing my eyes and trying to think of nothing, I always came out of the session feeling a lot calmer. Fast forward to today and I can now isolate thoughts and throw them away if they are garba…

Very interesting. What timespan did you need to start seeing good results? Are you still improving after 2 years?

@amelius It's been in my experience "results" vary widely with a lot of people. Part of the reason is that calmness is not the ultimate aim of meditation, but rather, a side-effect.

For some people, the practice of meditation will quickly surface up a lot of anxiety and existential issues. It won't feel calm at all. Having been lured into thinking calmness is the end-goal, meditation is written off as "not working", when in fact in this case, it worked all too well.

Just some food for thought. I had written quite a bit more on different threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142283

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10156240

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#36

Post by hosh »

chrismealy wrote: post #29
hacker_9 wrote: post #9

I started meditating about 2 years ago because I liked the idea of having better 'control of my mind' - at the time I thought it was a gimmick but to my surprise it actually works. To begin with I found that after 20-30mins of closing my eyes and trying to think of nothing, I always came out of the session feeling a lot calmer. Fast forward to today and I can now isolate thoughts and throw them away if they are garba…

You can really nix unhappy thoughts? How can I do this too?

It's not really about nixing unhappy thoughts. A lot of people misunderstand that as the purpose of meditation. It's possible to get into bliss states through some form of concentration exercises, and among my friends, we call them bliss junkies.

Rather, it's the avoidance of unhappy emotions and thoughts that create distortions, leading to neurotic emotional and mental patterns. These emotions and thoughts will arise on their own regardless of how you try to suppress them (and often times, suppressing them will make them grow stronger).

The basic practice is very simple at it's core: what arises will arises, what passes will pass. So when it arises, you allow it to arise -- and remain aware. When it passes, you let it go -- and remain aware.

As things that have normally been suppressed start surfacing up, it's as if you are "sweating out" these toxic thoughts. It will get worse before it gets better.

It goes deeper than that, since detoxifying isn't the ultimate aim either. It's the direct experience that what you think of as "self" is really an illusion. It's only after that, that things start get really interesting.

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#37

Post by hosh »

hacker_9 wrote: post #34
chrismealy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can really nix unhappy thoughts? How can I do this too?

This stuff is hard to explain textually as it's more about feelings you have, but if I were to try.. during meditation bad memories will enter your focus and set off a cascade of negative reactions. But the deeper into the meditation you are the harder it is to shake your focus. Instead you end up observing these patterns of thoughts and how they evoke one another. Your let them have their moment in the sun and then…

@hacker_9 there are various "acceleration" techniques to help surface things up faster.

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#38

Post by gammafactor »

MichaelGG wrote: post #32
gammafactor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here (that one gradually slips into with meditation or other mystical systems) is that there is no "You". Happy, sad, You, other people, all these "things" don't really exist, they're all illusions, mind constructs, artificial. Once you see the world for what it really is (a dream), all the masks fall away and you're free to go on with your "life" unencumbered by artificial thought creations that another art…

Is there a school of meditation that is in line with what reality actually is and recognizes minds as the result of real physical processes?

Well odds are there exists something relevant, but it probably falls under "quantum mysticism" or other such quackery (e.g. transcendental meditation has actual scientists backing it but you gotta pay 1000$ for the privilege and it's really a cult). Science and mysticism/philosophy don't really mix.

When you're doing meditation, especially no-mind meditation, physical processes are irrelevant, indeed the entire world is irrelevant. Looking for explanations or theories or systems in the scientific way is, on one hand, hard/impossible due to subjectivity and on the other, goes against the entire practice since you're inventing even more dualities and thought constructs when you should be tearing everything down!

Re: Cognitive mechanisms in meditation practice

#39

Post by lostinbass »

hosh wrote: post #36
chrismealy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can really nix unhappy thoughts? How can I do this too?

It's not really about nixing unhappy thoughts. A lot of people misunderstand that as the purpose of meditation. It's possible to get into bliss states through some form of concentration exercises, and among my friends, we call them bliss junkies. Rather, it's the avoidance of unhappy emotions and thoughts that create distortions, leading to neurotic emotional and mental patterns. These emotions and thoughts will aris…

Curious as to what the 'acceleration techniques' you described in the above comments are. Mind elaborating a bit?
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