41–50 of 83 posts
Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters. Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.
My experience is that concentration directed meditation is more like a tool. You can use concentrative skills to advance towards direction you want in the life. You are in control. If you do awareness oriented practice long enough, it starts to work on you. You are on the ride 'to the unknown'. Motivations change and unless you make nessesary changes in your life, you lose motivation and have life chrisis. Usual solu…
Interesting. Would you care to share an example of this?
As someone who grew up in a western Buddhist community (and skimmed the article), this rings true to me. I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools. There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once yo…
I'm singularly glad someone did this research. Anecdata: Mindfullness never worked for me, and I suspect even harmed me some. I noticed that I became more nihilist and depressed when I used to meditate. Meditation basically made me start realizing the pointlessness of everything, the little value of emotions, which is great if your goal is to become unemotional and destressed. However, stress and emotions are how hum…
Emotional detachment is not the goal of mindfulness practice as I understand it. The point of mindfulness practice is to become more of aware of your body, mind, feelings, and develop insight to things as they really are (see Satipatthana). Devaluing emotions is exactly the opposite of the point of practice. Instead you want to get in touch with your emotions, deeply. The trick with not going off the rails emotionall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think he was being sarcastic...
Maybe. Maybe not. >Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or literature or something with all that clear-headedness Maybe they don’t want to? Maybe their motivation is towards intrinsic goals, while science/literature/etc. are all extrinsic. Just because they aren’t doing X doesn’t naturally and obviously mean it is because they cannot do X. e.g. I can readily be a manager, and have more of…
Douglas Adams comes to mind.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
I used to wonder why Buddhist monks seemed to do so little productive work despite all the productivity their meditation was supposed to bring. Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or literature or something with all that clear-headedness? This might explain it.
I used to wonder why Buddhist monks seemed to do so little productive work despite all the productivity their meditation was supposed to bring. Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or literature or something with all that clear-headedness? This might explain it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna
and
I used to wonder why Buddhist monks seemed to do so little productive work despite all the productivity their meditation was supposed to bring. Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or literature or something with all that clear-headedness? This might explain it.