9 ms·

How corporates co-opted mindfulness to make us bear the unbearable (2015)

111 points by nowherecat 9y ago

PaulHoule 9y ago
Yep, just how antidepressant manufactures co-opted research on social dominance to reverse some of the biochemical changes that happen when you are "ground down like a minion".
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Do you have a source for that? Or something I can read further?
  - pc86 9y ago
    Of course not
    - PaulHoule 9y ago
      Of course: https://innermammalinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Serotonin-and-Social-Dominance-Citations.pdf https://innermammalinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/... http://www.ulm.edu/~palmer/TheBiochemistryofStatusandtheFunctionofMoodStates.htm http://www.ulm.edu/~palmer/TheBiochemistryofStatusandtheFunc... I thought everybody knew this.
      - lazerpants 9y ago
        Most people think depression is caused by, "an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain", and don't know much else about it. Thanks for the papers, they're interesting and I hadn't seen all of that research, despite being somewhat familiar with the field.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    Funny enough, despite the deep sense of resentment in the original comment, it's actually kind of accurate. Lower social standing is often associated with changes in cytokine expression mediated by cortisol signalling, and changes in cytokine expression and cortisol signalling are closely linked to depression (it looks more and more like at least some cases of depression are immunological in nature). There's a possible evolutionary advantage to inhibiting cortisol downregulation through glucocorticoid resistance (this is linked to depression) in situations where individuals would be in "defeated social positions." However, the theory goes that those situations and the related glucocorticoid resistance are not meant to be long term systemic changes, merely short term ones, and long term use of this feedback mechanism results in depression. I am hungover and running purely on modafinil at the moment, so I am unable to eloquently explain and I'll link a paper. So, to the extent that anti-depressant drugs are based on observed changes to molecular signals in the brain (that's how SSRIs came about), and that those changes in the molecular signals are due to essentially a miswired social cue, the original comment is correct. Here are some papers: glucocorticoid resistance, depression, cytokines (this is a great paper): http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924-977X(17)30210-9/fulltext http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924... evolutionary perspective on cytokines and depression: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471490605002887 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471490605...
maxxxxx 9y ago
I used to teach meditation and yoga for a while. One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice. It took me a while to accept but now I agree with this viewpoint.
- avtar 9y ago
  One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice. That doesn't sound accurate. Are you suggesting that one would be less resilient to stresses linked to livelihood or stress in general? Over time meditation and yoga practices should help develop equanimity extensively, a factor that helps deal with stressful situations with more grace and emotional balance.
  - Boothroid 9y ago
    One thing I've never quite understood - if you are teaching yourself to become more equanimous how do you avoid becoming less concerned about the things that really matter also?!
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      Equanimity doesn't have to be numbness. You can be very passionate about something and still being calm.
      - hinkley 9y ago
        I had a boss who didn't understand the difference between panic and urgency. Every 'pep talk' he tried to give us turned into a short day and drinks after work because we were so depressed or freaked out. If your friend falls in the water or is about to be hit by a bus, getting excited about it doesn't help anybody. You have do something, and quickly, but with purpose and reason.
Boothroid 9y ago
'The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.' This seems completely back to front to me. Surely it's men that have greater societal expectations of stoicism, toughness etc. than women, and fewer options for social support. I'm sure we all know about higher rates of suicide in men. These are often linked to the types of pressures I mention. Apart from that I generally agree that this trend is pretty insidious. One of their latest wheezes is 'resilience', which from my reading boiled down to 'hey there x, what's your major malfunction that you can't cope with the soul destroying drudgery and corporate psychopathy like y? Perhaps you should read our piece about resilience to learn how to become a good drone again. We wouldn't want to have to lose you would we?'.
- ndrr 9y ago
  I'd like to hear more about it, but maybe there is too much content behind it for the editorial. Are women more likely to accept a bad work environment? Are women more likely to be encouraged to keep quiet? Is being encouraged to keep quiet more likely to be effective on women than men?
voidhorse 9y ago
If it can be sold and used as a tool for subjugation humans will quickly determine and optimize the ways in which to do so. That's the beauty of capitalism--or possibly even economics in general--it acknowledges and respects nothing that falls outside of its own scope. No matter how ancient, sophisticated, sacred, or meaningful a practice may have been--no matter what reverence our ancestral betters may have applied to it, capitalism will find the most effective way to utilize it as a strictly economic material and convert it into profit. For the true capitalist there is no extra or supra-capitalism. Capitalism envelops the world. It swallows and defuses all meaning and translates it into the small subset of meanings it understands. All is reduced to pure economic terms--it is no longer a question of interfacing with the practices of your ancestors, respecting history or engaging in spiritual practice--the meditation is only understood and useful insofar as it has an assignable quantity related to productive increase or related directly to profit. I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.
- Chardok 9y ago
  Well said. Its hard to quantify it in an objective context, but there is something just viscerally disgusting about taking something so old and spiritually significant to humans and perverting it into a tool for efficiency.
- Interfacelabs 9y ago
  Very well said indeed.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  >For the true capitalist What percentage of the US population do you believe falls into this category?
  - voidhorse 9y ago
    None. I mean it less a concrete instantiation and more as an abstract type that rises as a side effect of the system. Jeff Bezos, to unfairly use him as an example, I doubt has any desire to efface the significance of historical human practice. I doubt he has a vendetta against the subtle social dynamics and sphere of relationships that are established between localized mom and pop shops and customers and that often begin to humanize, at least to a minimum extent, the otherwise emotionless and inhuman process of transaction--bartering, recollection of past trades and successes, allowing a purchase on one's word, trust--all of these cultural (an instance where we can still find something identifiable as human in capitalist practice) dynamics are snuffed by Amazon's enterprise. Amazon's mission is not to kill off this whole space of human practice--its simply dedicated to the capitalist game, and once Jeff is playing there's really no way for him to stop--abiding as he is to the logic of capitalism--the rules of the game. It is a logic that reduces all to one vector--profit. So long as increased profit is the result of an action it is encouraged by capitalism--capitalism itself provides no moral system--it selects a single quantity and hopes to maximize it abstracted from all the details and context--worse, it is assumed justified as natural human behavior (this is the sinister underside of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"--there's no need to worry about economy because it will "regulate itself" because it is predicated on trade a "natural phenomena" and set of behaviors--all of a sudden the argument for capitalism turns to putting it forward as a naturalism and not the construct and theory that it is--nothing in nature says that man has to maximize his profits, aka his excess--nature only needs you to break even--it only demands you survive. Capitalists would rather have you believe the will to excess is natural because now the system suddenly has some outside justification). Luckily living breathing human beings aren't influenced only by capitalism--other stuff has stuck around, which curbs anyone from becoming the 'true capitalist' which is just a manifestation of a capitalist system operating at full efficiency and only under its own logic--i.e. other value judgments don't mix in, as they do with actual human beings--giving pause to what would be the logical solution for increased profits in the capitalist game (i.e. not giving a damn about the shuttering local store and all the people and relationships this closure displaces, not giving a damn about environmental side effects, etc. etc.). Capitalism lends itself to a sort of Machiavellianism in the name of profit--the reason this is something that's dangerous and that we ought to pay attention to is because, like all dangerous phenomena, it is subtle. People buy into systemic structures without fighting against them because the scale is nigh insurmountable, especially once the phenomena reaches a global level, and sometimes people don't even realize they are participants. Jeff Bezos for instance, is not going to stop the Amazon gravy train just because a few thousands if not millions of other people have been negatively impacted by Amazon. Not only the economic sense, but the social and cultural effects too--death of the small shop owner, death of local shop apprenticeships, death of plurality(suggestions from different employees at your local store are changed into the one monolithic suggestion feed of amazon--polyphonic and eclectic curation and division of tastes decays, individuals transform into collectives, fans into fanbases, group think develops)--in general the gradual reduction of types of relationships to those only manageable and congenial to the notion of exchange, and furthermore, exchange that can be mediated or enhanced through the use of technology.
nxsynonym 9y ago
> "If we truly become mindful of our existence then our recurrent anxieties become not just a wave we watch pass through our minds, not something to be mastered in order to be a better servant, but a call to take action in order to be more fully alive." Agreed. The whole point behind meditation and mindfulness is to create a more well rounded spiritual life/existence. Not to ignore the things that cause you distress or pain, but to identify them clearly and untangle issues to figure out how to get past them. My current company offers a whole slew of "wellness programs" - yoga, meditation, running clubs, etc. Great in theory, but they all take place during "lunch break", are limited to 20 mins or so, and charge (albeit, a small fee). None of these, I believe, are to benefit the lives of the employees but to create a sense of "forward thinking" in the company to encourage productivity. Want my stress and anxieties to disappear at work and get me to be more productive? Pay more and ask for less working hours.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Yep. That why I wouldn't teach meditation in a corporate setting. It's just window dressing without any real intent of making people's lives better.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    As the teacher, couldn't you have taught it in a way to make people's lives better?
- lazerpants 9y ago
  I think your feelings on this will depend mostly on your relationship with your employer. Running programs during lunch makes sense as people have engagements before and after work that would be harder to break than changing lunch plans. Some employers really do want to do things to help employees, and some of them cannot pay more just by waiving a magic wand. Of course, since the employee is usually the one with less power, the employer's motivations can feel perverse, even if they aren't. Regarding mindfulness meditation classes at work, I think it is mostly a good thing, as it's something that can be used outside of the office just as well as in the office. However, I don't think it's okay to require employees to take such classes.
hosh 9y ago
While there is truth to that, mindfulness provides the basis for authentic expression of the natural self. And often times, that will mean GTFO of an abusive situation. How you know whether it really is authentic and not simply a story is that it arises naturally, spontaneously, and effortless. It will have a "deep" marker to it. There is an active test you can apply: try to poke at the action. If it resists, comes up with any excuses, rationalizations, or justifications in order to stay attached to it, then it is still a story, albeit, coming from a very deep place inside of it. If in poking it, it stays silent and it feels like it is expressed unsupported by any narrative, then that is coming from your authentic self. In other words, it doesn't need your approval or disapproval, or anyone else's, including social norms and corporate policy.[1] Note: the Buddhist notions don't have a notion of "true self" (or rather, it moves from "no self" -> "true self" -> "no self"). I'm drawing from classical, transcendental non-dual Shaiva Tantra[2] (which inspired and cross-polinated with tantric Buddhist), and it goes with "true self" -> "no self" -> "true self". The point of mindfulness is your freedom and your state of mind. It's fine if you are inspired to practice it because corporations made space for it (or more cynically, make you do it in order to tolerate bad situations). Your mind is your own, whether you want to be happy or miserable. There _are_ people who will mindfully tolerate bad working conditions as expressed from their authentic self ... and there are many others who won't. You won't know until you have cleared enough of your own obscurations to find out. [1] The followup is: in tantra, someone's natural, authentic self may be an asshole. If you don't like what your natural, authentic self is, tantra provides the tools for transformation into a different natural, authentic self. However, it is not as simple as changing the narrative, since a change in narrative is merely a change in narrative and not a change in your natural, authentic self. [2] Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated
squozzer 9y ago
I would say that most institutions that exist for moral edification -- religions, Boy Scouts, civic clubs -- do essentially the same thing which is align the attitudes of the weaker to the benefit of the stronger.
- linksnapzz 9y ago
  Much the same way that popular media has sold socially-acceptable prepackaged rebellion for the mollification of disgruntled adolescents (and adolescents-at-heart) for decades...
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    >socially-acceptable prepackaged rebellion I am having a hard time coming up with an example of this.
    - twoquestions 9y ago
      Wild hair, Hot Topic, believing in politics contrary to the area you're in. It's rebellion, but acceptable compared to bombing state offices or somesuch.
nickstefan12 9y ago
Interesting take. I could paraphrase this as a response to this sort of strawman, "It sucks that we have to pay [for xyz necessity], wait [in traffic for abc experience], and accept [toxic influencers on your life], but thats just part of the human experience". I think its an acceptable strawman, as often we do need to remind ourselves that, "No one but me is actually forcing me to [live here / work here / see these people ]".
ninju 9y ago
This article is from 2015...shouldn't the HN entry be preceded with a (2015) (what are the rules/guidelines on that ?)

111 points by nowherecat 9y ago

Yep, just how antidepressant manufactures co-opted research on social dominance to reverse some of the biochemical changes that happen when you are "ground down like a minion".

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Do you have a source for that? Or something I can read further?
- pc86 9y ago
  Of course not
  - PaulHoule 9y ago
    Of course: https://innermammalinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Serotonin-and-Social-Dominance-Citations.pdf https://innermammalinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/... http://www.ulm.edu/~palmer/TheBiochemistryofStatusandtheFunctionofMoodStates.htm http://www.ulm.edu/~palmer/TheBiochemistryofStatusandtheFunc... I thought everybody knew this.
    - lazerpants 9y ago
      Most people think depression is caused by, "an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain", and don't know much else about it. Thanks for the papers, they're interesting and I hadn't seen all of that research, despite being somewhat familiar with the field.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  Funny enough, despite the deep sense of resentment in the original comment, it's actually kind of accurate. Lower social standing is often associated with changes in cytokine expression mediated by cortisol signalling, and changes in cytokine expression and cortisol signalling are closely linked to depression (it looks more and more like at least some cases of depression are immunological in nature). There's a possible evolutionary advantage to inhibiting cortisol downregulation through glucocorticoid resistance (this is linked to depression) in situations where individuals would be in "defeated social positions." However, the theory goes that those situations and the related glucocorticoid resistance are not meant to be long term systemic changes, merely short term ones, and long term use of this feedback mechanism results in depression. I am hungover and running purely on modafinil at the moment, so I am unable to eloquently explain and I'll link a paper. So, to the extent that anti-depressant drugs are based on observed changes to molecular signals in the brain (that's how SSRIs came about), and that those changes in the molecular signals are due to essentially a miswired social cue, the original comment is correct. Here are some papers: glucocorticoid resistance, depression, cytokines (this is a great paper): http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924-977X(17)30210-9/fulltext http://www.europeanneuropsychopharmacology.com/article/S0924... evolutionary perspective on cytokines and depression: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471490605002887 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471490605...

maxxxxx 9y ago

I used to teach meditation and yoga for a while. One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice. It took me a while to accept but now I agree with this viewpoint.

avtar 9y ago
One of my teachers said that meditation should make you less resilient to stress and make you realize that need to change your life. So if someone credits their material success to meditation it's best to view this as an abuse or misunderstanding of the practice. That doesn't sound accurate. Are you suggesting that one would be less resilient to stresses linked to livelihood or stress in general? Over time meditation and yoga practices should help develop equanimity extensively, a factor that helps deal with stressful situations with more grace and emotional balance.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  One thing I've never quite understood - if you are teaching yourself to become more equanimous how do you avoid becoming less concerned about the things that really matter also?!
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Equanimity doesn't have to be numbness. You can be very passionate about something and still being calm.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      I had a boss who didn't understand the difference between panic and urgency. Every 'pep talk' he tried to give us turned into a short day and drinks after work because we were so depressed or freaked out. If your friend falls in the water or is about to be hit by a bus, getting excited about it doesn't help anybody. You have do something, and quickly, but with purpose and reason.

Boothroid 9y ago

'The current translations of ancient mindful practices are also highly gendered. In a culture where women are much more likely to be encouraged to apply acceptance, silence, stillness and the relinquishing of resistance to their problems, the trap of mindfulness can be set to stun for those who may be much more in need of speaking up, resisting and taking space in the workplace.' This seems completely back to front to me. Surely it's men that have greater societal expectations of stoicism, toughness etc. than women, and fewer options for social support. I'm sure we all know about higher rates of suicide in men. These are often linked to the types of pressures I mention. Apart from that I generally agree that this trend is pretty insidious. One of their latest wheezes is 'resilience', which from my reading boiled down to 'hey there x, what's your major malfunction that you can't cope with the soul destroying drudgery and corporate psychopathy like y? Perhaps you should read our piece about resilience to learn how to become a good drone again. We wouldn't want to have to lose you would we?'.

ndrr 9y ago
I'd like to hear more about it, but maybe there is too much content behind it for the editorial. Are women more likely to accept a bad work environment? Are women more likely to be encouraged to keep quiet? Is being encouraged to keep quiet more likely to be effective on women than men?

voidhorse 9y ago

If it can be sold and used as a tool for subjugation humans will quickly determine and optimize the ways in which to do so. That's the beauty of capitalism--or possibly even economics in general--it acknowledges and respects nothing that falls outside of its own scope. No matter how ancient, sophisticated, sacred, or meaningful a practice may have been--no matter what reverence our ancestral betters may have applied to it, capitalism will find the most effective way to utilize it as a strictly economic material and convert it into profit. For the true capitalist there is no extra or supra-capitalism. Capitalism envelops the world. It swallows and defuses all meaning and translates it into the small subset of meanings it understands. All is reduced to pure economic terms--it is no longer a question of interfacing with the practices of your ancestors, respecting history or engaging in spiritual practice--the meditation is only understood and useful insofar as it has an assignable quantity related to productive increase or related directly to profit. I can at least take some comfort in the fact that articles like this still crop up and call the beast into question.

Chardok 9y ago
Well said. Its hard to quantify it in an objective context, but there is something just viscerally disgusting about taking something so old and spiritually significant to humans and perverting it into a tool for efficiency.
Interfacelabs 9y ago
Very well said indeed.
Consultant32452 9y ago
>For the true capitalist What percentage of the US population do you believe falls into this category?
- voidhorse 9y ago
  None. I mean it less a concrete instantiation and more as an abstract type that rises as a side effect of the system. Jeff Bezos, to unfairly use him as an example, I doubt has any desire to efface the significance of historical human practice. I doubt he has a vendetta against the subtle social dynamics and sphere of relationships that are established between localized mom and pop shops and customers and that often begin to humanize, at least to a minimum extent, the otherwise emotionless and inhuman process of transaction--bartering, recollection of past trades and successes, allowing a purchase on one's word, trust--all of these cultural (an instance where we can still find something identifiable as human in capitalist practice) dynamics are snuffed by Amazon's enterprise. Amazon's mission is not to kill off this whole space of human practice--its simply dedicated to the capitalist game, and once Jeff is playing there's really no way for him to stop--abiding as he is to the logic of capitalism--the rules of the game. It is a logic that reduces all to one vector--profit. So long as increased profit is the result of an action it is encouraged by capitalism--capitalism itself provides no moral system--it selects a single quantity and hopes to maximize it abstracted from all the details and context--worse, it is assumed justified as natural human behavior (this is the sinister underside of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand"--there's no need to worry about economy because it will "regulate itself" because it is predicated on trade a "natural phenomena" and set of behaviors--all of a sudden the argument for capitalism turns to putting it forward as a naturalism and not the construct and theory that it is--nothing in nature says that man has to maximize his profits, aka his excess--nature only needs you to break even--it only demands you survive. Capitalists would rather have you believe the will to excess is natural because now the system suddenly has some outside justification). Luckily living breathing human beings aren't influenced only by capitalism--other stuff has stuck around, which curbs anyone from becoming the 'true capitalist' which is just a manifestation of a capitalist system operating at full efficiency and only under its own logic--i.e. other value judgments don't mix in, as they do with actual human beings--giving pause to what would be the logical solution for increased profits in the capitalist game (i.e. not giving a damn about the shuttering local store and all the people and relationships this closure displaces, not giving a damn about environmental side effects, etc. etc.). Capitalism lends itself to a sort of Machiavellianism in the name of profit--the reason this is something that's dangerous and that we ought to pay attention to is because, like all dangerous phenomena, it is subtle. People buy into systemic structures without fighting against them because the scale is nigh insurmountable, especially once the phenomena reaches a global level, and sometimes people don't even realize they are participants. Jeff Bezos for instance, is not going to stop the Amazon gravy train just because a few thousands if not millions of other people have been negatively impacted by Amazon. Not only the economic sense, but the social and cultural effects too--death of the small shop owner, death of local shop apprenticeships, death of plurality(suggestions from different employees at your local store are changed into the one monolithic suggestion feed of amazon--polyphonic and eclectic curation and division of tastes decays, individuals transform into collectives, fans into fanbases, group think develops)--in general the gradual reduction of types of relationships to those only manageable and congenial to the notion of exchange, and furthermore, exchange that can be mediated or enhanced through the use of technology.

nxsynonym 9y ago

> "If we truly become mindful of our existence then our recurrent anxieties become not just a wave we watch pass through our minds, not something to be mastered in order to be a better servant, but a call to take action in order to be more fully alive." Agreed. The whole point behind meditation and mindfulness is to create a more well rounded spiritual life/existence. Not to ignore the things that cause you distress or pain, but to identify them clearly and untangle issues to figure out how to get past them. My current company offers a whole slew of "wellness programs" - yoga, meditation, running clubs, etc. Great in theory, but they all take place during "lunch break", are limited to 20 mins or so, and charge (albeit, a small fee). None of these, I believe, are to benefit the lives of the employees but to create a sense of "forward thinking" in the company to encourage productivity. Want my stress and anxieties to disappear at work and get me to be more productive? Pay more and ask for less working hours.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Yep. That why I wouldn't teach meditation in a corporate setting. It's just window dressing without any real intent of making people's lives better.
- lazerpants 9y ago
  As the teacher, couldn't you have taught it in a way to make people's lives better?
lazerpants 9y ago
I think your feelings on this will depend mostly on your relationship with your employer. Running programs during lunch makes sense as people have engagements before and after work that would be harder to break than changing lunch plans. Some employers really do want to do things to help employees, and some of them cannot pay more just by waiving a magic wand. Of course, since the employee is usually the one with less power, the employer's motivations can feel perverse, even if they aren't. Regarding mindfulness meditation classes at work, I think it is mostly a good thing, as it's something that can be used outside of the office just as well as in the office. However, I don't think it's okay to require employees to take such classes.

hosh 9y ago

While there is truth to that, mindfulness provides the basis for authentic expression of the natural self. And often times, that will mean GTFO of an abusive situation. How you know whether it really is authentic and not simply a story is that it arises naturally, spontaneously, and effortless. It will have a "deep" marker to it. There is an active test you can apply: try to poke at the action. If it resists, comes up with any excuses, rationalizations, or justifications in order to stay attached to it, then it is still a story, albeit, coming from a very deep place inside of it. If in poking it, it stays silent and it feels like it is expressed unsupported by any narrative, then that is coming from your authentic self. In other words, it doesn't need your approval or disapproval, or anyone else's, including social norms and corporate policy.[1] Note: the Buddhist notions don't have a notion of "true self" (or rather, it moves from "no self" -> "true self" -> "no self"). I'm drawing from classical, transcendental non-dual Shaiva Tantra[2] (which inspired and cross-polinated with tantric Buddhist), and it goes with "true self" -> "no self" -> "true self". The point of mindfulness is your freedom and your state of mind. It's fine if you are inspired to practice it because corporations made space for it (or more cynically, make you do it in order to tolerate bad situations). Your mind is your own, whether you want to be happy or miserable. There _are_ people who will mindfully tolerate bad working conditions as expressed from their authentic self ... and there are many others who won't. You won't know until you have cleared enough of your own obscurations to find out. [1] The followup is: in tantra, someone's natural, authentic self may be an asshole. If you don't like what your natural, authentic self is, tantra provides the tools for transformation into a different natural, authentic self. However, it is not as simple as changing the narrative, since a change in narrative is merely a change in narrative and not a change in your natural, authentic self. [2] Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated

squozzer 9y ago

I would say that most institutions that exist for moral edification -- religions, Boy Scouts, civic clubs -- do essentially the same thing which is align the attitudes of the weaker to the benefit of the stronger.

linksnapzz 9y ago
Much the same way that popular media has sold socially-acceptable prepackaged rebellion for the mollification of disgruntled adolescents (and adolescents-at-heart) for decades...
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  >socially-acceptable prepackaged rebellion I am having a hard time coming up with an example of this.
  - twoquestions 9y ago
    Wild hair, Hot Topic, believing in politics contrary to the area you're in. It's rebellion, but acceptable compared to bombing state offices or somesuch.

nickstefan12 9y ago

Interesting take. I could paraphrase this as a response to this sort of strawman, "It sucks that we have to pay [for xyz necessity], wait [in traffic for abc experience], and accept [toxic influencers on your life], but thats just part of the human experience". I think its an acceptable strawman, as often we do need to remind ourselves that, "No one but me is actually forcing me to [live here / work here / see these people ]".

ninju 9y ago

This article is from 2015...shouldn't the HN entry be preceded with a (2015) (what are the rules/guidelines on that ?)