4 ms·

What from the article makes you think that meditation is a bad thing?

vishnugupta 5y ago
"As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem. Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind. True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes. "
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Minsky thought meditation was dangerous in and of itself. (e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning) Personally I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations which was already leading me to bad outcomes.
  - 613style 5y ago
    "Accepting" in the context of mindfulness doesn't imply being passive. That's a common misconception. It's often said that passivity is the "near enemy" of acceptance, meaning one is easily mistaken for the other.
    - LanceJones 5y ago
      This is an underrated comment. Mindfulness is a precursor to objectifying your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions -- rather than "subjectifying" them (in other words, you are not your thoughts, emotions, etc). It doesn't at ALL mean laying down for others to kick you and taking it. They're completely different things.
      - lanstin 5y ago
        "Do you have the patience to await right action to arise?" was a sign in my first teachers house (which we would walk by during Kinhin). Meditation's effect on your life and happiness probably varies based on what things are you are not seeing in your normal life. When I started meditating, I immediately discovered I was angry many times a day; several years later, having tried to respond to this reality in various ways, I got divorced as I found it impossible to ignore this previously un-perceived aspect of my reality. Now I am happier and more calm and so on, but the meditation definitely caused some shake up not more calm for quite some time.
    - chillingeffect 5y ago
      glad to see this here and I would expand on it bc I think it's so important. For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad." Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to acknowledge something happened without it driving thought to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary person, and he'll get what he has coming. But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy? That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my neighbor injured me for life." And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus. When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and cool can of cranberry lime seltzer. We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down, separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something new. This is an automatic process our minds have apparently evolved. And it's free! But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms with it. not appreciating it, but become capable of sitting with it. So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of accepting, rather than someone telling you you should appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I inevitably recall it. Please accept my compassion for whatever your circumstances were and consider the advice of the late Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to function better again.
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    Meditation is a tool that cuts both ways. It must be used, like any tool, with respect and careful practice. The Buddha analogized it to a poisonous viper in the wrong hands. I'll give you one example from my own practice. When I learned the Mahasi style of vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, which has you note sense objects as they arise, I noted everything, including conversation. I noted "hearing, hearing, hearing" as I'd listen to the story of my elocutor. This brought me no closer to awakening! The act of hearing and awareness of hearing is so very far from understanding the content of conversation. Small misunderstandings like these lead to big consequences. "What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see." Abstruse and subtle! Difficult to discern. Difficult for anyone, even monks in their monastic redoubts.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Vipassana is insight meditation, which is generally contrasted with mindfulness (known as 'samatha'). "Mindfulness" is generally thought of as a prerequisite to insight, though an especially committed vipassana practitioner might well develop both concurrently. (The aforementioned 'insight' is of course meant as insight into the three core features of phenomenology, viz. the impermanence of subjective states, the all-pervading dissatisfaction of 'craving' and 'clinging' and the lack of a true 'self'.)
      - lewispollard 5y ago
        Mindfulness meditation is a term we use to describe the practices that certain famous/influential western meditation practitioners developed after coming back from the mostly theravada countries that they went to to learn meditation practices from the monks there in the 50-70s. Generally speaking, those practices were vipassana/insight practices, and so mindfulness practices are in essence, or at least are modified vipassana techniques. Mindfulness is the translation we tend to use for the Pali `sati`, mindfulness techniques tend to develop this quality of `sati`, which is a kind of re-contextualisation of your perception from "I am having an experience" to "an experience is happening within conscious awareness" in a direct, first person way. And yeah, the development of sati, along with other helpful factors, can help to gain insight, which is basically the way the mind looks at itself and conceptualises its own experience, in a kind of self-reflective way, and what it means to relax and tighten the tension that holding the mind in that way causes. In these western teachings and in the theravadan writings, usually insight is contrasted with "concentration", which is `samatha`, which is a kind of effortless concentration on one thing. Focusing solely on the sensations of the breath at a point in your body is one way of doing samatha, or imagining a complex mental image (of, say, a mandala) or a simple image like a white circle. This kind of meditation is about dropping your attachment to everything except this one thing, which creates a strong attachment to that thing to the exclusion of all else, and this is often pleasurable because you're both strongly mentally attached to that sensation and it's a sensation that keeps happening at high "volume", which is very rewarding. With this you can enter states called `jhana` (which is actually pretty much the only word in early buddhism for "meditation", and through the spread of Buddhism, linguistically became "chan" in China, "zen" in Japan, and "seon" in Korea, "thien" in Vietnam...) The reason that they are contrasted is because mindfulness practices tend to go the other way and include a larger scope of what you are including in your attention, for example mentally labelling what senses are being activated from moment to moment, or the sensations of the body/breath in a more wholesome way without blocking out external stimuli, but developing very strong clarity on the momentary aspects of those sensations and experiences, sort of applying a "samatha" style concentration to analysing the sensations as the "three core features" you described. Both the approaches tend to suppress the "hindrances" in the mind that prevent jhana and insight. These are recurring thoughts and emotions that trouble you and stop this kind of mental configuration from happening in a stable way. The techniques use up mental and perceptual "bandwidth" in holding the mind in a way so that attention/awareness and holding on/letting go are balanced on whatever the object of meditation is. By developing samatha or sati, or a some of both mixed together, you can enter interesting and unusual states of consciousness that are pleasant, weird, intriguing, peaceful- that can be used as a point of inquiry into why the mind is grasping at things in certain ways and what the result of that grasping is doing to it.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    Towards the end of the article, they touch on this: > The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it. The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a problematic situation that you were struggling with, and that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being able to see that neither of those options are necessarily the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you have. One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just magically fall into place. I think it downplays the difference between being aware of something and the effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
    - lewispollard 5y ago
      > I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy. I like that and somewhat agree. It's not that some mystical force makes life easier for you because of your merit, it's just that you have a much greater awareness and comfort of your own ignorance. So it's not a surprise when that ignorance is revealed by the situations of life in stark ways, and you can more calmly respond to them than if you were otherwise triggered by them in an identified way.
  - p_j_w 5y ago
    >e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning I'd be curious how this view is justified. >I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations I've never heard of this being part of mindfulness, unless said unacceptable situations were entirely beyond your control.
- hammock 5y ago
  That comment sounds like it applies to watching TV (or any other form of escapism) as much as meditation.

"As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic changes have not reached the root of the problem. Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind. True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes. "

PaulHoule 5y ago
Minsky thought meditation was dangerous in and of itself. (e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning) Personally I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations which was already leading me to bad outcomes.
- 613style 5y ago
  "Accepting" in the context of mindfulness doesn't imply being passive. That's a common misconception. It's often said that passivity is the "near enemy" of acceptance, meaning one is easily mistaken for the other.
  - LanceJones 5y ago
    This is an underrated comment. Mindfulness is a precursor to objectifying your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions -- rather than "subjectifying" them (in other words, you are not your thoughts, emotions, etc). It doesn't at ALL mean laying down for others to kick you and taking it. They're completely different things.
    - lanstin 5y ago
      "Do you have the patience to await right action to arise?" was a sign in my first teachers house (which we would walk by during Kinhin). Meditation's effect on your life and happiness probably varies based on what things are you are not seeing in your normal life. When I started meditating, I immediately discovered I was angry many times a day; several years later, having tried to respond to this reality in various ways, I got divorced as I found it impossible to ignore this previously un-perceived aspect of my reality. Now I am happier and more calm and so on, but the meditation definitely caused some shake up not more calm for quite some time.
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    glad to see this here and I would expand on it bc I think it's so important. For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad." Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to acknowledge something happened without it driving thought to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary person, and he'll get what he has coming. But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy? That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my neighbor injured me for life." And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus. When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and cool can of cranberry lime seltzer. We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down, separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something new. This is an automatic process our minds have apparently evolved. And it's free! But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms with it. not appreciating it, but become capable of sitting with it. So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of accepting, rather than someone telling you you should appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I inevitably recall it. Please accept my compassion for whatever your circumstances were and consider the advice of the late Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to function better again.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  Meditation is a tool that cuts both ways. It must be used, like any tool, with respect and careful practice. The Buddha analogized it to a poisonous viper in the wrong hands. I'll give you one example from my own practice. When I learned the Mahasi style of vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, which has you note sense objects as they arise, I noted everything, including conversation. I noted "hearing, hearing, hearing" as I'd listen to the story of my elocutor. This brought me no closer to awakening! The act of hearing and awareness of hearing is so very far from understanding the content of conversation. Small misunderstandings like these lead to big consequences. "What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see." Abstruse and subtle! Difficult to discern. Difficult for anyone, even monks in their monastic redoubts.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Vipassana is insight meditation, which is generally contrasted with mindfulness (known as 'samatha'). "Mindfulness" is generally thought of as a prerequisite to insight, though an especially committed vipassana practitioner might well develop both concurrently. (The aforementioned 'insight' is of course meant as insight into the three core features of phenomenology, viz. the impermanence of subjective states, the all-pervading dissatisfaction of 'craving' and 'clinging' and the lack of a true 'self'.)
    - lewispollard 5y ago
      Mindfulness meditation is a term we use to describe the practices that certain famous/influential western meditation practitioners developed after coming back from the mostly theravada countries that they went to to learn meditation practices from the monks there in the 50-70s. Generally speaking, those practices were vipassana/insight practices, and so mindfulness practices are in essence, or at least are modified vipassana techniques. Mindfulness is the translation we tend to use for the Pali `sati`, mindfulness techniques tend to develop this quality of `sati`, which is a kind of re-contextualisation of your perception from "I am having an experience" to "an experience is happening within conscious awareness" in a direct, first person way. And yeah, the development of sati, along with other helpful factors, can help to gain insight, which is basically the way the mind looks at itself and conceptualises its own experience, in a kind of self-reflective way, and what it means to relax and tighten the tension that holding the mind in that way causes. In these western teachings and in the theravadan writings, usually insight is contrasted with "concentration", which is `samatha`, which is a kind of effortless concentration on one thing. Focusing solely on the sensations of the breath at a point in your body is one way of doing samatha, or imagining a complex mental image (of, say, a mandala) or a simple image like a white circle. This kind of meditation is about dropping your attachment to everything except this one thing, which creates a strong attachment to that thing to the exclusion of all else, and this is often pleasurable because you're both strongly mentally attached to that sensation and it's a sensation that keeps happening at high "volume", which is very rewarding. With this you can enter states called `jhana` (which is actually pretty much the only word in early buddhism for "meditation", and through the spread of Buddhism, linguistically became "chan" in China, "zen" in Japan, and "seon" in Korea, "thien" in Vietnam...) The reason that they are contrasted is because mindfulness practices tend to go the other way and include a larger scope of what you are including in your attention, for example mentally labelling what senses are being activated from moment to moment, or the sensations of the body/breath in a more wholesome way without blocking out external stimuli, but developing very strong clarity on the momentary aspects of those sensations and experiences, sort of applying a "samatha" style concentration to analysing the sensations as the "three core features" you described. Both the approaches tend to suppress the "hindrances" in the mind that prevent jhana and insight. These are recurring thoughts and emotions that trouble you and stop this kind of mental configuration from happening in a stable way. The techniques use up mental and perceptual "bandwidth" in holding the mind in a way so that attention/awareness and holding on/letting go are balanced on whatever the object of meditation is. By developing samatha or sati, or a some of both mixed together, you can enter interesting and unusual states of consciousness that are pleasant, weird, intriguing, peaceful- that can be used as a point of inquiry into why the mind is grasping at things in certain ways and what the result of that grasping is doing to it.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Towards the end of the article, they touch on this: > The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it. The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a problematic situation that you were struggling with, and that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being able to see that neither of those options are necessarily the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you have. One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just magically fall into place. I think it downplays the difference between being aware of something and the effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
  - lewispollard 5y ago
    > I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy. I like that and somewhat agree. It's not that some mystical force makes life easier for you because of your merit, it's just that you have a much greater awareness and comfort of your own ignorance. So it's not a surprise when that ignorance is revealed by the situations of life in stark ways, and you can more calmly respond to them than if you were otherwise triggered by them in an identified way.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning I'd be curious how this view is justified. >I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations I've never heard of this being part of mindfulness, unless said unacceptable situations were entirely beyond your control.
hammock 5y ago
That comment sounds like it applies to watching TV (or any other form of escapism) as much as meditation.