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Meditation: Why Bother?

vipassana.com

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Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#61

Post by silentbicycle »

asdflkj wrote: post #60
silentbicycle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meditation isn't a cure, it's just a good way to actually hear the alarms that may have been going off for years - a diagnostic technique. You hear all of the (demons? background processes?) that you've gotten tuned out, and realize how much mental energy they drain. (Hold on - maybe I have email. And while I'm there - are people on HN voting me up? What was I saying?) Since meditation is basically just sitting still…

Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like…

Oh, sure. I'm just reacting to people who think that "sitting Zen" is going to make magical enlightenment fairies fly out of their asses. The way Zen/Buddhism was typically presented in the US, you'd think it had summoned Magic Fairies, or at least was full of antioxidants or something.

I think it probably works for most people, but the actual effects really aren't that profound, which fucks with peoples' expectations. You aren't going to be able to fly, but you might catch yourself before you get mad and chew out a friend about something you know really doesn't matter. Which superpower would you rather have?

I'd also recommend that people find a sane local group to meditate with, or whatever, but I don't know where everyone on HN lives and can't give useful advice there, so my advice is skewed.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#62

Post by silentbicycle »

jonhendry wrote: post #48
tel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all sensible abstractions of the way we think, but to judge the problems developed by this framework as the root of all dissatisfaction is to take it too seriously. To pass off this conviction as truth is then dishonest. By this model, we're clearly dishonest all the time, but the author does a disservice to the reader through the holier than thou rhetoric. Postmodern angst isn't the introduction of new ideas…

"Whatever happened to good old koans? Just because they're tricky doesn't mean they were an accident." Koans are hardly omnipresent throughout Buddhism. They're a pretty late addition. The Buddha wouldn't have had a clue what you were talking about.

Yeah, but "Buddhism" in the US means Soto and (especially) Rinzai Zen, since the Beats (esp. at the San Francisco Zen Center) did so much to popularize it. Otherwise, Buddhism has mostly stayed in local ethnic enclaves.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#63

Post by silentbicycle »

Groxx wrote: post #35

What's with the see-saw of meditation articles lately? It's better than expected, science™ proves it! It's a waste of time, news at eleven! We'll show you how for only some monies!

It's one of the common HN tropes. Pretty soon we'll have yet another post about nootropics or polyphasic sleep. "Ask HN: I want to be smarter, but don't want to expend any effort! Help me get something for nothing!"

Meditation actually helps (in my experience), but it's about on par with actually getting exercise or getting enough sleep - totally lame. :)

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#64

Post by klodolph »

A lot of people find this article well written, or alternately, they find the article patronizing and some are angry at it.

I just think the article is incorrect, which is a necessary consequence of its sweeping generalizations. A quote from the article: "You are a mess." The author spends much of the article telling the reader how unhappy the reader is, how much the reader is suffering. From a rhetorical perspective, I can understand why the author would do this. Yet I'm not convinced that I'm unhappy, and the rest of the article falls apart without that foundation.

"It [life] is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights." To me, life feels more like emotional airplane, at home above the clouds but makes the occasional layover in Detroit.

Your experiences may vary.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#65

Post by seancron »

Avshalom wrote: post #19
wangwei wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently, you didn't understand the essay or the meditation. Meditation is not nihilism or anti-materialism. I am not sure how i can explain it to you to make it clear to you. I remember from a Buddhist saying that if your glass is full, there is nothing one can do about it. You need to remove something in your glass first before you can pour anything else into it. I feel like you are full of ignorance and false as…

You're really going to call me close minded in defense of an essay that gets all of five paragraphs in before calling my experiences and emotions fake? An essay that dismisses the idea that there exists people comfortable with feeling the full range of human emotions, that dismisses civilization as a whole as self deception? And you're sure you want to defend a Buddhist by telling me he's not anti-materialistic? Also…

Theravada Buddhism, and The Buddha's teachings actually stress that Buddhism is not nihilism or asceticism[1], and it not about materialism. Instead, Buddhism takes the Middle Path and does not encourage either extreme. Buddhism at its core is about realizing the transience of life. It is about realizing how we are all interconnected and how our reality is formed through our interactions with the world. We suffer because we are overly attached to transient objects and ideas. To be free of this suffering, we must realize the ultimate reality and nature of our world. We must fully let go of our attachments, and instead immerse ourselves in the reality that is now. The transient reality that we and others have created. The reality that is constantly shifting and constantly evolving.

[1] Much has been written about emptiness and nothingness in Buddhism, with one prominent example being Nagarjuna, whose argument was in summary: if you cannot be empty of an individual self, then that means you have an individual self. If you have an individual self, you exist regardless of causes. If you exist regardless of causes, then you affect anything since everything changes you in some way. Therefore, you are empty of any individual self, and instead only have a causal self.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#66

Post by _debug_ »

tel wrote: post #27

This essay angers me with its presumption. It reads off like a fortune teller reaching for whatever level of generalized sympathy will get you nodding along. Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to see the boiling resentment and stress in watching families sing Sweet Caroline along with the crowd at the local baseball game, or maybe I'm just far too aware of the postmodern tradition of misery the essayist is targeting…

I didn't realize that people are now charging for this. It's free in India, and runs on donations.

Actually, someone posted the link to the Anapanasati Sutta in a recent HN thread on meditation (thank to that person!), and you can just read it and figure out what to do yourself. I would like to think that the Buddha would prefer that you behave like a scientist, which is the path he took towards understanding the mind + life/death. "Buddhism" is an ism, and quite different from being a Buddha.

http://www.greatwesternvehicle.org/ati_website/canon/sutta/m...

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#67

Post by anonman1 »

I had an understanding of what meditation was while on an acid trip. Some people who've done lsd describe a spiritual experience which they experience. I can say I had a good experience. What I felt was an experience of me and everything around me moving as one. That is to say the universe and I are connected to one another. It is an experience which is difficult to articulate, but something which one feels. This experience is largely missing in the sensory experience of everyday life.

However, one of the better parts of my experience was watching the plants. Their movement as one is what one is attempting to mimic in meditation. Plants are immensely connected to the world in a way we are not. Mimicking them is how we can connect ourselves to the same feeling. This mimicking of plants is what I feel meditation is. It is why it became easier for me to meditate after doing lsd than before as the reasoning behind it makes much more sense.

Some things which helped me understand meditation at a deeper level are:

* Bhagavad Gita - The last couple of chapters make more sense. The whole I am everything was a bit annoying before, but it makes more sense when you get the point. If everything is One, then everything is beautiful.

* Foucault's The Subject and Power or anything Foucault - Meditation is supposed to break the chains our desire. Foucault's The Subject and Power is immensely powerful in understanding that we are all part of a system and governed by rules. Humans are by no means free but are held together by a discursive power which we are unaware of. One of the things we are supposed to realize is how we are entrapped by these rules and gain the ability to break rules.

If you think this is all tripe please feel free to ignore it. This is after all my own experience and it can be completely different to a different individual.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#68

Post by gnaffle »

Avshalom wrote: post #15

>And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. Or you can embrace that inherent unsatisfactoriness and affect real change in the world. >Examine each of these…

The point (AFAIK) of meditation is simply to become aware of yourself, what you really are and how you react and relate to the world around you. You learn to see how and why you react to the situations in your life.

It might or might not help you, many of those who meditate feel that it does. But you don't get magic powers or instant success in your life. It also doesn't prevent you from affecting real change in the world, but you don't necessarily have to be angry or unsatisfied to do so.

The goal isn't to sit in a cave and starve. In fact, the first buddha tried following all these "noble paths" and they didn't help him, except to discover the middle way.

A buddhist friend once said that if I needed buddhism in my life, it would come to me some day. I still haven't started practicing meditation, but maybe one of these days I'll get around to it. :)

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#69

Post by gnaffle »

Groxx wrote: post #35

What's with the see-saw of meditation articles lately? It's better than expected, science™ proves it! It's a waste of time, news at eleven! We'll show you how for only some monies!

Actually, the book is available for free and is meant to introduce you to meditation without needing a mentor.

Re: Meditation: Why Bother?

#70

Post by gnaffle »

klodolph wrote: post #64

A lot of people find this article well written, or alternately, they find the article patronizing and some are angry at it. I just think the article is incorrect, which is a necessary consequence of its sweeping generalizations. A quote from the article: "You are a mess." The author spends much of the article telling the reader how unhappy the reader is, how much the reader is suffering. From a rhetorical perspective…

I read the article, and instead of getting angry when he said "You are a mess", I stopped to think: "Who is he talking to? Is he talking to me? Or perhaps to the people who actually feel like they are a mess, and will identify with what he is saying?"

I have lots of problems, but I don't feel that I'm a mess. I'm overall quite happy. I still really appreciated the article, and it made me think that meditation might be a good thing for me regardless. There are certainly lots of things in my life that I could be better at dealing with, and probably some things that I'm not aware of.

And let's say that something terrible happens in my life. My family dies, I lose my job and get cancer. Would I be sad and unhappy? Probably. Would meditation help me in that situation? It might. Even though it wouldn't revive my family, get back my job or cure my cancer, it would perhaps help me deal with the situation in a better way.

If you spend your programming life never looking at your old code to see if you can improve it, always making the same mistakes and always getting a headache by supporting your old code, there's something you could do (code reviews, refactoring) - but you might not realize it or be motivated enough to do it. I think it's the same with the rest of your life.

That said, there is no point in spending all your time refactoring your code if you don't learn anything from it and if you're not shipping working code. And there's no point in meditating if you don't feel it has a positive impact on your life. :)

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