15 ms·

Buddha and Mind

85 points by benbreen 5y ago

astrophysics 5y ago
The article's author, smugly waits to reveal his wokeness until the very last paragraph. Apart from that, it's mainly rubbish. "This ahistorical reinterpretation of Buddhism can certainly seem like a breath of fresh air to the modern white, upper-middle class Westerner, who, disillusioned with the Christianity or the Judaism of her upbringing, is still not fully satisfied with what our secular culture has to offer."
- chana_masala 5y ago
  Kind of riffing off of that, I think that there would be less atheists in America if more of them were exposed to Hinduism.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    ...and many more Buddhists if more were exposed to Buddhism. The interesting part about these religions is that unlike two other prominent major religions (Christianity and Islam), they rarely prostelytize or seek converts. If they were as gung-ho about trying to spread their religion as Christianity has, for example, there'd probably be a lot more Hindus and Buddhists. Incidentally, belief in a god is not absolutely necessary for either religion, since both Hinduism and Buddhism have atheistic flavors (and theistic ones too, before someone jumps in and claims that Buddhism is always atheistic).
    - chana_masala 5y ago
      There is a split in Hindu schools of thought - some do not consider atheism as a valid Hindu path, i.e. that nastika is not part of Hinduism and that the three requirements for any Hindu sect are 1. belief in one supreme God that is immanent and transcendent, 2. belief in reincarnation, 3. belief in karma. Nastika schools like Jain, Buddhism and some Hindu sects believe 2 and 3 but not 1.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are particularly predictable and tedious—and usually get nasty. The idea here is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting thing from an article, or the thing that creates more interesting responses in you. One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
chana_masala 5y ago
This is kind of unrelated but whenever discussions on meditation come up here, especially recently ones that have mentioned the dangers around it, I am reminded that my lineage stresses that meditation should not be undertaken until one has sufficient preparation with simpler practices, such as karma yoga (service orientated worship). The perspective is that if you start these practices before "calming down" (like being easy to anger, easily distracted in thoughts) that it can be very dangerous to learn these higher practices - that you can easily become even more depressed, angry or insane than when you started. I've seen a number of articles on HN talking about people becoming depressed, depersonalized and so on after trying mindfulness meditation and I find it anecdotally interesting that it lines up with the teachings I am familiar with.
- swayvil 5y ago
  I dunno man. Awareness is already this big powertool that we are all using all the time. Casually, sloppily, intensely, obsessively, recklessly. But not really very intelligently. (like what's an engineer but a man who uses his awareness like a hammer, beating riddles into submission?) Learning to use your awareness intelligently strikes me as close to an unalloyed good thing. Meditation can do that.
  - chana_masala 5y ago
    I don't disagree that it's good to use awareness intelligently, but you don't even need meditation for that, according to Hindu thought much of that can be achieved through other yogas, namely karma yoga. Meditation is much more than learning to use your awareness intelligently. There are many types of meditation, too.
    - swayvil 5y ago
      I know of only 2 meditation techniques. Samatha and Vipassana. (Aka Concentration and Growing. Aka meditation with a seed and meditation without a seed). I have never heard of a meditation technique that was not simply a variation on those 2. But if you have one then I am all ears. Also, ya, you could say that meditation touches some other stuff than just "getting intelligent with your awareness". Sure. And as far as other ways of getting intelligent with your awareness are concerned. Ya sure, I can imagine such existing. Also. Ya. Meditation can lead to much crazy. But that's a good education :)
Falandafa2021 5y ago
Meditation is about quieting ones mind to ultimate stillness. This is where the ego disolves which is not exactly in alignment with the culturally dominant materialism that we find surrounding us (i.e. the quest for money power and status) all things that rely on an inflated ego. Using meditation to improve in moving up in society is like using wood logs to put out a fire.
- PraetorianGourd 5y ago
  I wouldn’t distill an entire region of the globe down to wanting money, power and status. Nor would I say that wanting those things, especially money, requires an inflated ego. The stereotype of the noble destitute is overplayed. Wanting to be able to provide for my family and have financial security can be noble as well. It’s how one accomplishes those things that can be unethical. Perhaps mindfulness helps someone stay grounded so that their focus on money doesn’t inflate their ego? But seriously please don’t use stereotypes even if the stereotyped is of a group that is commonly thought of as in power.
  - thewarrior 5y ago
    You’re being a little unfair to the commenter here. The western interpretation of meditation is that the rat race can stress you out so meditate once in a while so you can keep running. Hence the name mindfulness based stress reduction. This can help a lot of people but this was not what the Buddha was about. Buddhism goes far deeper and it’s understandable why they want to sell a more sanitized version. I can’t imagine a corporation paying for a spiritual practice that would make their employees question if working their lives away was really worth it. The Buddha wanted us to transcend ourselves. To realize the illusory nature of most of our conceptions of ourselves. It’s not an app or a success technique. It’s something beyond all such ideas.
    - Falandafa2021 5y ago
      Thank you for explaining much better than myself friend :) As a practitioner of a Buddhist practice (see my username), meditation is about developing and mastering concentration the mind. The Buddha taught Meditation with out precepts (or living a moral life properly aligned with the universe) was in vain. This is this the reason the Buddha stressed precepts on how one should live as ultimately a mind focused on the material world and self interest will never have the stillness of one living a life of virtue for others which is why many people find meditation so awesome until they try to still there minds and blame the practice for this inability like in this article. The problem I see is the framing of meditation into the portrait of modern society.
swayvil 5y ago
In Buddhism the term "Mind" refers to "Awareness" (aka attention, sati) What you direct when you pay attention. What you concentrate when you concentrate. What gets jerked around when you are distracted. (As opposed to "Mind", synonymous with "intellect", which is not what they mean. Call it a bad translation)
- peter303 5y ago
  They have dozens of terms for states of mind and brain activity. Many are more precise than in western science.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
cwkoss 5y ago
"In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures fell to zero degrees Fahrenheit, while they wore only woolen or cotton shawls. " How well has this been replicated? Has a non-buddhist person ever been able to demonstrate similar feats? It's such an astounding claim. I want to believe, but am still skeptical because it just so astounding.
- knuthsat 5y ago
  Wim Hof comes to mind. Guy melts ice for hours to break a world record. His control over his autonomous nervous system is amazing, basically maintains normal body temp even when aggressively cooled. It looks like he can control his immune response too.
- nestorD 5y ago
  I have seen tummo meditation used by non-buddhist to raise their body temperature. With a little bit of practice you should be able to experiment with it yourself (one common recommendation: don't practice it in a warm room / wearing warm clothes).
  - DennisP 5y ago
    I've never found clear instructions for tummo. How do you learn it?
    - nestorD 5y ago
      Years ago I found good instructions on a website targeting kayakers (it was presented as a way to avoid geting cold in the water) but I am unable to find the reference now.
- raz32dust 5y ago
  I was also curious about this. Looks like it is slightly exaggerated [1] It is 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and the study mentions 8.3 degrees Celsius. A linked follow up study in 2013 was able to reproduce temperature increases between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius [2] Also, the results suggest that "...the peripheral temperature increases are primarily the result of increased peripheral blood flow due to peripheral muscular action (and proximity of the femoral artery) rather than a result of psychological (caused by meditation) or physiological (caused by breathing or isometric techniques) states." It looks like it is caused by blood vessels opening up (vasodilation) as a response to certain kinds of breathing exercises. If true, it is just an indirect result of the practice, not some form of body control that extends to other use cases. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harvard-study-confirms-tibetan-monks-can-raise-body-temperature-with-their-minds/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harvard-study-confirms-tib... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058244#s3 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
schoen 5y ago
> Much of the doctrine is not acceptable to a modern Western worldview, so researchers of meditation have to cherry-pick the parts of Buddhism they like and ignore the rest. For example, they might draw from certain passages of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta about developing mindfulness of the breath and body but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground. Or they might integrate into their research the Dalai Lama’s teachings on compassion, but they stop listening when he gets to the teachings on rebirth. David Chapman has a whole (long, elaborate) theory about this: https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism (actually I guess you could spend several days tracking down all of the different pieces of this account that Chapman has written across his several web sites!)
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  > but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground As morbid as that is, I feel like I would actually gain a lot of value from doing that...
  - southeastern 5y ago
    Death meditations are common in a lot of faiths. In Islam it's mentioned in hadith, Christianity has the practice of memento mori. And even in Time there was a tradition that during a Triumph, a large parade for a successful military commander and one of the greatest honors that could be bestowed on a person, a slave would be tasked to sit by the commanders ear during the celebration and whisper "remember you will die". I think it's naturally something a lot of people could gain from
    - schoen 5y ago
      If you've been around Catholics on Ash Wednesday, you may have seen them wearing ashes, which were probably imposed by a priest reciting "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." (Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return.) a liturgical adaptation of Genesis 3:19.
  - 5y ago
berniemadoff69 5y ago
nothing zen about animated sticky headers that make the page jump around when you scroll down. a giant "Information on NEH and COVID-19:" banner that takes up 1/4 of the screen and won't go away. why is this acceptable?
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Barrin92 5y ago
Think the article is right in its diagnosis of mindfulness. Jack Dorsey going on a meditation retreat so he can go back and be even more productive at building the things that send everyone to meditation retreats has always been kind of funny to me. The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all. C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan, but nothing in between. If you reject spirituality at least you acknowledge to take it seriously on its own terms, if you commit to it that's fine as well, but when you profane religious practices by turning them into some kind of corporate new-age productivity exercise in my mind it's about the worst of all worlds.
- chillwaves 5y ago
  Why can't just take the cultural lessons of the past for what they are and not believe them literally or completely dismiss them?
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    because they're not just lessons from the past, they're sacred ways of life. They're serious commitments, not something to be scavenged according to your own interests. Exemplified by the fact that someone who uses Buddhism as some sort of glorified productivity tool hasn't learned anything from Buddhism but does exactly what Buddhism tries to eliminate, namely desire and the self. The entire mechanistic thinking of treating culture like some kind of junkyard that can be scrapped for parts is itself a product of a sort of spiritually dead worldview.
- bgroat 5y ago
  That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it
carrolldunham 5y ago
Check out the miserable fate of "Culadasa" (author of the Mind Illuminated) if you want to see what kind of Midas touch situation can come of meditation without the companion practise of virtue, particularly restraint. e: (Midas because the guy claimed to be so "enlightened" and "living in the moment" that he lost the ability to worry about say, other people's feelings, right and wrong, causing harm etc. Acted then in ways that caused his disgrace he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)
- sunshineforever 5y ago
  Can you link to this story?
  - carrolldunham 5y ago
    I don't know if it's summarized somewhere because it is still unfurling over reddit and forum reactions (to the claim against him, then his admission, then his later attempt to back-pedal). I would warn you that there's a lot of time to be wasted addictively trying to unpack what exactly happened here because 1) it's all arguments and interpretation and 2) if you have any interest in using meditation to move toward freedom from desire, here's someone who claimed to spell out exactly how to do that, but then obviously it didn't actually happen because he admitted to acting in a way that implies a high level of sensual desire, grasping and craving etc. - so it brings the whole undertaking into question, right? My eventual take loosely is that the guy was somewhat of a charlatan/double-minded from the start so, it's fine - it's still worth trying to free yourself of desire you can probably do something like that, and best to go on as if this guy never existed.
  - Trasmatta 5y ago
    The tl;dr is that he was hiring prostitutes and lying to his wife about it. EDIT: seems like there's a lot more to the story, and I think the poster you're replying to is assuming only the worst possible interpretation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/a_message_from_culadasa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/... Also, apparently he now has terminal cancer, and likely has less than a year to live. He's staying with family, which makes the above posters comment about "he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)" seem untrue and unnecessarily cruel.
Borrible 5y ago
That is the beauty of capitalism, its ability to turn everything into a commodity to exploit it. Religion, science, lies, truth, everything. One has to love it.
goodpoint 5y ago
Relevant: "McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality" by Ronald Purser ''Provocatively illustrates how mindfulness has been hijacked by corporate interests, turned into an opiate of the masses, and how we can radically rethink the meaning of mindfulness in contemporary life.'' -- Dr. Steven Stanley, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

85 points by benbreen 5y ago

The article's author, smugly waits to reveal his wokeness until the very last paragraph. Apart from that, it's mainly rubbish. "This ahistorical reinterpretation of Buddhism can certainly seem like a breath of fresh air to the modern white, upper-middle class Westerner, who, disillusioned with the Christianity or the Judaism of her upbringing, is still not fully satisfied with what our secular culture has to offer."

chana_masala 5y ago
Kind of riffing off of that, I think that there would be less atheists in America if more of them were exposed to Hinduism.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  ...and many more Buddhists if more were exposed to Buddhism. The interesting part about these religions is that unlike two other prominent major religions (Christianity and Islam), they rarely prostelytize or seek converts. If they were as gung-ho about trying to spread their religion as Christianity has, for example, there'd probably be a lot more Hindus and Buddhists. Incidentally, belief in a god is not absolutely necessary for either religion, since both Hinduism and Buddhism have atheistic flavors (and theistic ones too, before someone jumps in and claims that Buddhism is always atheistic).
  - chana_masala 5y ago
    There is a split in Hindu schools of thought - some do not consider atheism as a valid Hindu path, i.e. that nastika is not part of Hinduism and that the three requirements for any Hindu sect are 1. belief in one supreme God that is immanent and transcendent, 2. belief in reincarnation, 3. belief in karma. Nastika schools like Jain, Buddhism and some Hindu sects believe 2 and 3 but not 1.
dang 5y ago
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article and then rush into the HN comments to get angry about it. That leads to generic tangents, which are particularly predictable and tedious—and usually get nasty. The idea here is to have curious conversation. For that, a better practice would be to bring in the most interesting thing from an article, or the thing that creates more interesting responses in you. One way of looking at this is to take the following guideline to apply at the article level as well: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

chana_masala 5y ago

This is kind of unrelated but whenever discussions on meditation come up here, especially recently ones that have mentioned the dangers around it, I am reminded that my lineage stresses that meditation should not be undertaken until one has sufficient preparation with simpler practices, such as karma yoga (service orientated worship). The perspective is that if you start these practices before "calming down" (like being easy to anger, easily distracted in thoughts) that it can be very dangerous to learn these higher practices - that you can easily become even more depressed, angry or insane than when you started. I've seen a number of articles on HN talking about people becoming depressed, depersonalized and so on after trying mindfulness meditation and I find it anecdotally interesting that it lines up with the teachings I am familiar with.

swayvil 5y ago
I dunno man. Awareness is already this big powertool that we are all using all the time. Casually, sloppily, intensely, obsessively, recklessly. But not really very intelligently. (like what's an engineer but a man who uses his awareness like a hammer, beating riddles into submission?) Learning to use your awareness intelligently strikes me as close to an unalloyed good thing. Meditation can do that.
- chana_masala 5y ago
  I don't disagree that it's good to use awareness intelligently, but you don't even need meditation for that, according to Hindu thought much of that can be achieved through other yogas, namely karma yoga. Meditation is much more than learning to use your awareness intelligently. There are many types of meditation, too.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    I know of only 2 meditation techniques. Samatha and Vipassana. (Aka Concentration and Growing. Aka meditation with a seed and meditation without a seed). I have never heard of a meditation technique that was not simply a variation on those 2. But if you have one then I am all ears. Also, ya, you could say that meditation touches some other stuff than just "getting intelligent with your awareness". Sure. And as far as other ways of getting intelligent with your awareness are concerned. Ya sure, I can imagine such existing. Also. Ya. Meditation can lead to much crazy. But that's a good education :)

Falandafa2021 5y ago

Meditation is about quieting ones mind to ultimate stillness. This is where the ego disolves which is not exactly in alignment with the culturally dominant materialism that we find surrounding us (i.e. the quest for money power and status) all things that rely on an inflated ego. Using meditation to improve in moving up in society is like using wood logs to put out a fire.

PraetorianGourd 5y ago
I wouldn’t distill an entire region of the globe down to wanting money, power and status. Nor would I say that wanting those things, especially money, requires an inflated ego. The stereotype of the noble destitute is overplayed. Wanting to be able to provide for my family and have financial security can be noble as well. It’s how one accomplishes those things that can be unethical. Perhaps mindfulness helps someone stay grounded so that their focus on money doesn’t inflate their ego? But seriously please don’t use stereotypes even if the stereotyped is of a group that is commonly thought of as in power.
- thewarrior 5y ago
  You’re being a little unfair to the commenter here. The western interpretation of meditation is that the rat race can stress you out so meditate once in a while so you can keep running. Hence the name mindfulness based stress reduction. This can help a lot of people but this was not what the Buddha was about. Buddhism goes far deeper and it’s understandable why they want to sell a more sanitized version. I can’t imagine a corporation paying for a spiritual practice that would make their employees question if working their lives away was really worth it. The Buddha wanted us to transcend ourselves. To realize the illusory nature of most of our conceptions of ourselves. It’s not an app or a success technique. It’s something beyond all such ideas.
  - Falandafa2021 5y ago
    Thank you for explaining much better than myself friend :) As a practitioner of a Buddhist practice (see my username), meditation is about developing and mastering concentration the mind. The Buddha taught Meditation with out precepts (or living a moral life properly aligned with the universe) was in vain. This is this the reason the Buddha stressed precepts on how one should live as ultimately a mind focused on the material world and self interest will never have the stillness of one living a life of virtue for others which is why many people find meditation so awesome until they try to still there minds and blame the practice for this inability like in this article. The problem I see is the framing of meditation into the portrait of modern society.

swayvil 5y ago

In Buddhism the term "Mind" refers to "Awareness" (aka attention, sati) What you direct when you pay attention. What you concentrate when you concentrate. What gets jerked around when you are distracted. (As opposed to "Mind", synonymous with "intellect", which is not what they mean. Call it a bad translation)

peter303 5y ago
They have dozens of terms for states of mind and brain activity. Many are more precise than in western science.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

cwkoss 5y ago

"In meditative states, the monks had remarkable control over their body temperature and oxygen intake. They could use their body heat to dry wet towels placed around them, where most people would shiver uncontrollably. They could raise the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 17 degrees. Some could even spend a night on a rocky ledge at an elevation of 15,000 feet in the Himalayas, where temperatures fell to zero degrees Fahrenheit, while they wore only woolen or cotton shawls. " How well has this been replicated? Has a non-buddhist person ever been able to demonstrate similar feats? It's such an astounding claim. I want to believe, but am still skeptical because it just so astounding.

knuthsat 5y ago
Wim Hof comes to mind. Guy melts ice for hours to break a world record. His control over his autonomous nervous system is amazing, basically maintains normal body temp even when aggressively cooled. It looks like he can control his immune response too.
nestorD 5y ago
I have seen tummo meditation used by non-buddhist to raise their body temperature. With a little bit of practice you should be able to experiment with it yourself (one common recommendation: don't practice it in a warm room / wearing warm clothes).
- DennisP 5y ago
  I've never found clear instructions for tummo. How do you learn it?
  - nestorD 5y ago
    Years ago I found good instructions on a website targeting kayakers (it was presented as a way to avoid geting cold in the water) but I am unable to find the reference now.
raz32dust 5y ago
I was also curious about this. Looks like it is slightly exaggerated [1] It is 17 degrees Fahrenheit, and the study mentions 8.3 degrees Celsius. A linked follow up study in 2013 was able to reproduce temperature increases between 1 and 6 degrees Celsius [2] Also, the results suggest that "...the peripheral temperature increases are primarily the result of increased peripheral blood flow due to peripheral muscular action (and proximity of the femoral artery) rather than a result of psychological (caused by meditation) or physiological (caused by breathing or isometric techniques) states." It looks like it is caused by blood vessels opening up (vasodilation) as a response to certain kinds of breathing exercises. If true, it is just an indirect result of the practice, not some form of body control that extends to other use cases. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harvard-study-confirms-tibetan-monks-can-raise-body-temperature-with-their-minds/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harvard-study-confirms-tib... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058244#s3 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

schoen 5y ago

> Much of the doctrine is not acceptable to a modern Western worldview, so researchers of meditation have to cherry-pick the parts of Buddhism they like and ignore the rest. For example, they might draw from certain passages of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta about developing mindfulness of the breath and body but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground. Or they might integrate into their research the Dalai Lama’s teachings on compassion, but they stop listening when he gets to the teachings on rebirth. David Chapman has a whole (long, elaborate) theory about this: https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism (actually I guess you could spend several days tracking down all of the different pieces of this account that Chapman has written across his several web sites!)

Trasmatta 5y ago
> but overlook other passages about meditating over a corpse at a charnel ground As morbid as that is, I feel like I would actually gain a lot of value from doing that...
- southeastern 5y ago
  Death meditations are common in a lot of faiths. In Islam it's mentioned in hadith, Christianity has the practice of memento mori. And even in Time there was a tradition that during a Triumph, a large parade for a successful military commander and one of the greatest honors that could be bestowed on a person, a slave would be tasked to sit by the commanders ear during the celebration and whisper "remember you will die". I think it's naturally something a lot of people could gain from
  - schoen 5y ago
    If you've been around Catholics on Ash Wednesday, you may have seen them wearing ashes, which were probably imposed by a priest reciting "Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris." (Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you will return.) a liturgical adaptation of Genesis 3:19.
- 5y ago

berniemadoff69 5y ago

nothing zen about animated sticky headers that make the page jump around when you scroll down. a giant "Information on NEH and COVID-19:" banner that takes up 1/4 of the screen and won't go away. why is this acceptable?

dang 5y ago
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Barrin92 5y ago

Think the article is right in its diagnosis of mindfulness. Jack Dorsey going on a meditation retreat so he can go back and be even more productive at building the things that send everyone to meditation retreats has always been kind of funny to me. The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all. C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan, but nothing in between. If you reject spirituality at least you acknowledge to take it seriously on its own terms, if you commit to it that's fine as well, but when you profane religious practices by turning them into some kind of corporate new-age productivity exercise in my mind it's about the worst of all worlds.

chillwaves 5y ago
Why can't just take the cultural lessons of the past for what they are and not believe them literally or completely dismiss them?
- Barrin92 5y ago
  because they're not just lessons from the past, they're sacred ways of life. They're serious commitments, not something to be scavenged according to your own interests. Exemplified by the fact that someone who uses Buddhism as some sort of glorified productivity tool hasn't learned anything from Buddhism but does exactly what Buddhism tries to eliminate, namely desire and the self. The entire mechanistic thinking of treating culture like some kind of junkyard that can be scrapped for parts is itself a product of a sort of spiritually dead worldview.
bgroat 5y ago
That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler. Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about. He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization. A con artist who did the same thing. Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

carrolldunham 5y ago

Check out the miserable fate of "Culadasa" (author of the Mind Illuminated) if you want to see what kind of Midas touch situation can come of meditation without the companion practise of virtue, particularly restraint. e: (Midas because the guy claimed to be so "enlightened" and "living in the moment" that he lost the ability to worry about say, other people's feelings, right and wrong, causing harm etc. Acted then in ways that caused his disgrace he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)

sunshineforever 5y ago
Can you link to this story?
- carrolldunham 5y ago
  I don't know if it's summarized somewhere because it is still unfurling over reddit and forum reactions (to the claim against him, then his admission, then his later attempt to back-pedal). I would warn you that there's a lot of time to be wasted addictively trying to unpack what exactly happened here because 1) it's all arguments and interpretation and 2) if you have any interest in using meditation to move toward freedom from desire, here's someone who claimed to spell out exactly how to do that, but then obviously it didn't actually happen because he admitted to acting in a way that implies a high level of sensual desire, grasping and craving etc. - so it brings the whole undertaking into question, right? My eventual take loosely is that the guy was somewhat of a charlatan/double-minded from the start so, it's fine - it's still worth trying to free yourself of desire you can probably do something like that, and best to go on as if this guy never existed.
- Trasmatta 5y ago
  The tl;dr is that he was hiring prostitutes and lying to his wife about it. EDIT: seems like there's a lot more to the story, and I think the poster you're replying to is assuming only the worst possible interpretation: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/a_message_from_culadasa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/... Also, apparently he now has terminal cancer, and likely has less than a year to live. He's staying with family, which makes the above posters comment about "he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)" seem untrue and unnecessarily cruel.

Borrible 5y ago

That is the beauty of capitalism, its ability to turn everything into a commodity to exploit it. Religion, science, lies, truth, everything. One has to love it.

goodpoint 5y ago

Relevant: "McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality" by Ronald Purser ''Provocatively illustrates how mindfulness has been hijacked by corporate interests, turned into an opiate of the masses, and how we can radically rethink the meaning of mindfulness in contemporary life.'' -- Dr. Steven Stanley, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University