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Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

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Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#61

Post by arjn »

blueprint wrote: post #45
Psyonic wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but it's necessary to learn from an Enlightened being directly" Then how did Buddha himself learn it?

Gautama Buddha was a special case of someone in whose past lives there was endless awakening. It was for this reason that he was able to be born with very little karma left, making him able to get enlightenment through his individual practice of asceticism. So he's the one who became a Buddha for the very first time from being a Bodhisattva. But keep in mind that his practice was very different from anyone around him…

Regarding Gautama : you know this how ? Were you there when this (allegedly) happened ?

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#64

Post by gnaritas »

blueprint wrote: post #48
Alex3917 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No one has attained Enlightenment through Zen nor meditation in human history." Not sure what basis you have to say that. There are plenty of people who claim to have attained enlightenment who are alive today. There are even how-to guides that tell you exactly what to do down to the tiniest detail, e.g.: http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/going-for-str...

There are huge numbers of claims, but who among the multitudes has the evidence? If any Buddhist monks or temple has Buddha's teachings, they should also have the ways of life from the problems to the resolutions. But they don't have them, and instead they use meditation to trick people into giving up the real answers. It's the same thing as giving themselves up. This is an important point and the root cause of this…

> There are huge numbers of claims, but who among the multitudes has the evidence?

And here you are making all kinds of claims, without presenting a shred of evidence. Ponder on that.

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#65

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

Should be Titled: "Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase MY Happiness".

For me it does but I practice a very different and rare form of meditation. I can only call it "Sleeping Awake". Which took a while to achieve.

Basically, when you go to sleep at night your body slows its breathing & heart rate and you loose feeling of your limbs, while your mind looses consciousness and you black out. Your body and mind shut down at the same time. With meditation, particularly deep meditation (out of body experience / trance / hypnosis) you "sleep awake". Your body shuts down and goes to sleep but you are completely conscious the entire time. You can't feel your limbs, heart beat, or lungs breathing. You completely loose track of time and gravity and feel like you're floating around in a massive black, empty, nothingness.

If feels like you're floating around in the universe before it was made. Completely empty and quiet. No gravity. No direction. No time. No space. No memories. No emotions. No body. No flesh. It's the most peace you'll ever experience in your life apart from sleep and death. There's absolutely nothing on your mind. The only thing you're aware of, is your existence. That's all. And when you wake up, you feel amazingly refreshed. Not just physically but mentally. For me personally, I feel content and happy the rest of the day.

It makes me happy because the experience reminds me that, honestly, I don't matter. None of us do. We might matter to each other, but to the universe (which is mostly empty) our existence is worthless, useless, meaningless, purposeless. No matter what happens in your life, good or bad. Existence goes on, even after life is gone. And this concept, that nothing really matters, just takes a huge load off your shoulders. I don't know why "Sleeping Awake" evokes these feelings but it just does. It's a very calming and neutral experience.

So meditation for me did the opposite of what it did to the author of the article. It allowed me to control my emotions much more and see things from a neutral point of view. It allowed me to think, and observe an event or thought BEFORE reacting to it with an opinion or emotion.

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#66

Post by nsomaru »

The funny part about all this is the stark misconceptions westerners (and perhaps many easterners too) have about meditation in general.

The authority on meditation is long rooted in the subjective scientific (the observation and inference of trends based on data) scriptures of the East, yet most are willing to accept whatever their local practitioner has to say, or whoever is currently recommending meditation to them.

Meditation, whilst extremely easy to teach, is extremely difficult to practise. You will be EXTREMELY hard pressed to find any authority on the subject recommending meditation without specifying its prerequisite, self-control.

A mind that infested with thoughts and desires, constantly fluttering hither and thither is unfit to meditate. To force such a mind into single pointed concentration is dangerous.

Meditation is the final stage of spiritual practice, not the beginning.

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#67

Post by gurkendoktor »

psykotic wrote: post #57
tokenadult wrote: post #4

On 25 June 2012, Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True website recommended a LONG video of a lecture by Sam Harris, a meditation practitioner, from April’s Global Atheist Conference in Melbourne. The video lecture is on the subject of the atheist attitude toward death, and Harris leads his audience through a mindfulness meditation exercise as part of the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums I watched the w…

> Having lived in a predominantly Buddhist society during two different three-year stays as that society transformed from Third World colonialized poverty to First World free and democratic modernity, I'm not at all sure that most people would be more happy if most people were doing more mindfulness meditation. Could you expand on this baffling non-sequitur? I truly can't make heads or tails of it.

As I understood it, the transformation happened because people were not just accepting their negative emotions about their country but actually threw rocks and organized rallies.

> "There is genuine suffering in the world that it is important to do something about"

I wonder if I'm in the same now-democratic society. Does it have Daoist influences? :)

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#68

Post by joshkaufman »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #65

Should be Titled: "Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase MY Happiness". For me it does but I practice a very different and rare form of meditation. I can only call it "Sleeping Awake". Which took a while to achieve. Basically, when you go to sleep at night your body slows its breathing & heart rate and you loose feeling of your limbs, while your mind looses consciousness and you black out. Your body and mind shut…

Can you recommend any tutorials or books about this type of meditation? I'm curious.

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#69

Post by jshen »

Volpe wrote: post #55
jshen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" the only difference between spiritual beliefs and academic ones is the language used to express them" I'm not sure what is meant by "academic", but if it's a synonym for science then I disagree. Watch the link below (feynman on the scientific method), a little after the 5 minute mark he talks about the problems of "vague" theories. This vagueness is where spiritual beliefs usually diverge from scientific beliefs. h…

But buddhists generally aren't vague, they are extremely expressive about what they are talking about. Are you refering to something specific?

I've heard a lot of Buddhists talk about mind being separate from body. If you push them on it they get very vague very quickly.

Re: Why Meditation Doesn't Directly Increase Happiness

#70

Post by Alex3917 »

blueprint wrote: post #6
cellularmitosis wrote: post #3

Your Zen is showing :) I really enjoy posts like this which take a subject which is usually discussed from a "mystical" or "spiritual" perspective, and instead attempt to approach it from a physiological perspective. This pleases the knee-jerk part of my brain which often screams "skip the mumbo-jumbo and show me the data!" (and I'm slowly working to tame that part of my brain, because I recognize that an "empirical…

No one has attained Enlightenment through Zen nor meditation in human history. Buddha himself never claimed he was enlightened through meditation. That's a fabrication of Buddhist monks whose level of consciousness is quite a bit lower than that of Gautama. Nowadays, the misunderstanding has been passed down for thousands of years, so what I'm saying now seems unacceptable in modern society. If you accept that medita…

"Buddha himself never claimed he was enlightened through meditation."

He claimed he was enlightened by following the four noble truths, of which meditation is one component. It might not be possible to achieve enlightenment through only meditation, but it's probably not possible to achieve enlightenment without meditation either.

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