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I've always found it interesting that many meditation techniques involve "emptying the mind" or "clearing the mind" of thought. While practicing concentration

I've always found it interesting that many meditation techniques involve "emptying the mind" or "clearing the mind" of thought. While practicing concentration on a single point of focus definitely seems useful for strengthening the mind, I'm not sure that practicing a state of being completely devoid of thought is necessarily healthy. I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously, or meditate on focus in a high distraction environment. I wonder if there are meditation styles that embrace this?

vidarh 5y ago
Concentration meditation is in large part an exercise in the ability to focus, not on emptying the mind per se, though some traditions will use exercises that expect it. But concentration meditation is not an end in itself, but generally a tool to aid in meditating on other things, including on thoughts ariaing on your mind, bodily impulses, emotion and others.
n4r9 5y ago
I think a Buddhist might argue that one's mind is a high distraction environment.
- i_like_apis 5y ago
  Yes, I've had much practice in focus meditation and can attest to this. Sitting in one spot and earnestly focusing on an object of meditation for 15-30 minutes is harder than it sounds. As powerful as that is (and backed by science), still I wonder about an alternative meditation that focuses on fullness or activity of thought. But I subscribe to a materialist metaphysics that assumes the mind cannot truly be escaped and the benefit of meditation is to strengthen the mind and body.
dodecacat 5y ago
Maybe this? From “Mindfulness” by Domyo Sater Burk © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) isbn 978-1-61564-619-7 Expansive awareness meditation can end up getting you to the same place concentration meditation does (a still, present mind), but by using a different path…. You may find [it] works much better for you…. It just seems to depend on the way your mind works. [Y]ou try to open your awareness to everything. Imagine you’re waiting for some unusual or miraculous event, but you don’t know which of your senses you’ll perceive it with. Will it be a sound? Will it be a sight? Will it be a thought? Whenever you find your mind has wandered, instead of bringing it back to an object, you open your awareness back up. Any time you latch on to a train of thought or a particular sensation, you’re also closing down your awareness of other things. By opening your awareness as wide as you can, you’re returning to mindfulness of the present, just as you would by turning your attention back to an object of concentration. MINDFUL EXERCISE Sit, stand, or lie down and keep your eyes open. Widen your gaze, including what’s to the sides and above and below in your peripheral vision. (This will help keep you from getting distracted by particular things you can see.) Now watch your visual field as if it’s a movie—a slow-moving movie, perhaps, but one of those quiet, visually rich, artistic ones. Just keep watching. When you stop because you have gotten caught up in thinking, note that you have tuned out the “movie” because it’s boring, or because you think you know what’s going to happen next. Ask yourself, “When I really stop to look, is anything truly boring? Do I really know what’s going to happen next?”
mtalantikite 5y ago
Well, if you want to meditate on multi-layered themes, there's always the wild fox koan [1]. As others have noted, concentration in and of itself is not all of what meditation is. There are so many different sorts of practice traditions. In some practices there isn't an object of concentration at all, for instance in Mahamudra's teaching of samatha [2]. And you're certainly right that meditation can lead to unhealthy mental states, which is why it's important to work with a teacher or a practice tradition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_fox_koan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_fox_koan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahamudra#%C5%9Aamatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahamudra#%C5%9Aamatha
damontal 5y ago
Sam Harris kinda does this in his guided meditations. At times he asks you to sit in a noisy public place. His aim seems to be to to try to get you to quickly turn your attention on the thing that is currently doing the noticing. The point being a realization that there’s nothing there when you try to turn your attention to it. And that’s supposed to produce some kind of realization. Never worked for me in practice.
- tacoman 5y ago
  Same here. I have been trying to understand this practice for years and have never succeeded. Maybe someday it will click.
- i_like_apis 5y ago
  I believe there is an exercise benefit to meditation in noisy environments, as one form of practice. Swamy Vivekananda preferred meditating in a room with loud street noise in his youth. I used to have a coworker who would work while listening to stuff like Aphex Twin specifically to exercise his ability to focus. Personally my programming output would suffer but I think there's something to the exercise.
dbtc 5y ago
Yeah in the vipassana tradition check out 'Mahasi style noting'. In Zen, look up 'do nothing' or 'just sitting' - I don't know the traditional language. Shinzen Young has really good content on youtube IMO. Focusing on a single point is called 'anapana' in the vipassana tradition and is used as a way to calm the mind - like sharpening a knife - before moving on the the juicier stuff. It's sort of paradoxical but by giving attention to every passing thought/sensation, eventually they slow down and everything becomes much calmer, quieter, and clear.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Shikantaza is the traditional Japanese for just sitting in Zen. The approaches of increasing ones ability to focus awareness or openning awareness of all salient reality flow back and forth as one practises.
- kranner 5y ago
  Anapana(sati) is a specific kind of onepointedness exercise on following the breath; there are many, many more. (Literally, āna is inbreath, āpāna is outbreath, sati is 'remembering of'). What the (Goenka) Vipassana tradition teaches as Anapanasati is an overly specific extrapolated reading not supported by the Anapanasati Sutta itself. Scholar/monk Bhikku Analayo has published on this topic extensively. Many others have actually. The sutta itself is so vague that you can interpret it in any number of ways. Thai Forest Bhikku Buddhadasa even managed to fit Pranayama-like active breathing into his teaching of this sutta.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
waserwill 5y ago
This is maybe similar to some Jewish equivalents to mediation. The focus is ultimately on better action (the concept of commandments places an emphasis on doing over having the correct mindset or beliefs). These forms of meditation range from contemplative (of the characteristics of G-d, mystical concepts, etc.) to self improving (e.g. going out alone in nature and just saying to G-d whatever comes to mind, or visualizing what one learned to engage again in the topic, for understanding or building virtues). Jewish prayer and study can also be meditative, and can be either communal or secluded, verbalized or silent. [0] [1] There are certainly parallels in other Western traditions, particularly in Sufism [2] [3]. Personally, I think that the most effective form would be the one closest to a person's tradition; ideally, meditation is a practice that's embedded in a wider setting (of legends, language, ideas). Some more info: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitbodedut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitbodedut [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_meditation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muraqabah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muraqabah [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm
welshwelsh 5y ago
I would not say that meditation is about eliminating thoughts from the mind. That might not even be possible. It is more about setting intentions and sticking to them. For example, I might have some thoughts that are rooted in a specific desire. Perhaps I feel an urge to see what's new on Hacker News. I already did that 15 minutes ago, but so what. I'm thinking about what a great feeling it was last time I found something cool on this site. So I stop what I'm doing, navigate to Hacker News and proceed to waste 45 minutes reading through comment threads. Of course, there's another option. I could simply ignore the desire and do something else- like whatever it is I had otherwise planned to do with that time. But this is not so easy. Chances are, I will succumb to the desire and then rationalize to myself that this is, in fact, how I planned to spend my evening the whole time. With meditation, we practice by setting an unusual and specific intention, such as monitoring the breath. That way, if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, such as walking around, planning your weekend or replaying some event in your mind, you know that you are not doing what you intended to be doing. By returning to what you originally intended to do, you strengthen your ability to behave in an intentional manner, rather than being powerlessly yanked around by whatever idea happens to pop into your head at any given moment. I'm not sure whether meditating for very long periods of time is healthy. But most of us struggle greatly to do it for even 10 minutes. That's because 10 minutes is longer than our attention span: even if we firmly resolve to pay attention to something for that long, we inevitably get distracted by something else within a minute or two, and completely forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Don't you think that's troubling?
fellendrone 5y ago
> I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously This is basically ADHD, and whilst it has its advantages, wouldn't recommend it in general. The extreme of this might be psychedelics. A useful experience, but not necessarily something you want day to day. Thoughts are a tool. They're like mind software. The point of meditation isn't to stop thinking, it's to decouple yourself from them and see them from an outside perspective. In the process, perceiving that "you" are not your thoughts or your mind, and therefore direct the mind more effectively. It's a bit like closing background processes and gaining back resources. Those thoughts take resources to 'run', and many of them are constantly spawning new ones. When you turn your awareness on these processes, rather than them running ad hoc in the background, you can understand your self more and direct yourself better. The competing processes reintegrate. Or perhaps it's like an unruly dog that's constantly pulling you this way or that, but you're so used to it you don't even know it's unruly. Then you start to train it, and sooner or later you become a unit, working in coordination. Neurologically, it's likely modulating the default network, which some theorise is the neural correlate of the ego/self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network > Meditation – Structural changes in areas of the DMN such as the temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus have been found in meditation practitioners. There is reduced activation and reduced functional connectivity of the DMN in long-term practitioners. Various forms of nondirective meditation, including Transcendental Meditation and Acem Meditation, have been found to activate the DMN.
tshaddox 5y ago
I know very little about meditation, but it seems to me that a goal could be to develop awareness of and perhaps even more control over one’s thoughts, and that emptying one’s mind might be a useful exercise even when the goal is not to have a permanently empty mind. Kinda like how the goal of weightlifting usually isn’t to be able to permanently carry around heavy weights all the time.
fy20 5y ago
For me meditation is mostly about calming the mind (and body - sitting and focusing on your breathing will slow your heart rate), so that I can then focus on what is important throughout the day. Imagine you wake up and spend 30 minutes on your phone before struggling out of bed, then watch TV while eating reheated leftovers for breakfast, then rush off to work because you didn't realise the time. By the time you sit down at your desk you are going to have all sorts of nonsense thoughts going around your mind and have a really hard time focussing. Compare that to waking up, putting on calming music and making your favourite breakfast and fresh coffee, then consciously enjoying that while staring out the window at nature. After that, when you get to work you are going to much calmer. For me, meditation allows me to be in the later state even when I don't have time or the possibility to have my day start like that. Even if you do start with the calming day, you are still going to have some nonsense thoughts, but meditation allows you to train your mind to reduce them and focus on what is important to you.
dorfsmay 5y ago
This is like saying sleeping is a "waste of time, how can I be more productive during my sleep?". "clearing the mind", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more). Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation. I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state. [1]: https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Shamatha#Shamatha_without_an_Object https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Shamatha#Shamatha_... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

vidarh 5y ago

Concentration meditation is in large part an exercise in the ability to focus, not on emptying the mind per se, though some traditions will use exercises that expect it. But concentration meditation is not an end in itself, but generally a tool to aid in meditating on other things, including on thoughts ariaing on your mind, bodily impulses, emotion and others.

n4r9 5y ago

I think a Buddhist might argue that one's mind is a high distraction environment.

i_like_apis 5y ago
Yes, I've had much practice in focus meditation and can attest to this. Sitting in one spot and earnestly focusing on an object of meditation for 15-30 minutes is harder than it sounds. As powerful as that is (and backed by science), still I wonder about an alternative meditation that focuses on fullness or activity of thought. But I subscribe to a materialist metaphysics that assumes the mind cannot truly be escaped and the benefit of meditation is to strengthen the mind and body.

dodecacat 5y ago

Maybe this? From “Mindfulness” by Domyo Sater Burk © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) isbn 978-1-61564-619-7 Expansive awareness meditation can end up getting you to the same place concentration meditation does (a still, present mind), but by using a different path…. You may find [it] works much better for you…. It just seems to depend on the way your mind works. [Y]ou try to open your awareness to everything. Imagine you’re waiting for some unusual or miraculous event, but you don’t know which of your senses you’ll perceive it with. Will it be a sound? Will it be a sight? Will it be a thought? Whenever you find your mind has wandered, instead of bringing it back to an object, you open your awareness back up. Any time you latch on to a train of thought or a particular sensation, you’re also closing down your awareness of other things. By opening your awareness as wide as you can, you’re returning to mindfulness of the present, just as you would by turning your attention back to an object of concentration. MINDFUL EXERCISE Sit, stand, or lie down and keep your eyes open. Widen your gaze, including what’s to the sides and above and below in your peripheral vision. (This will help keep you from getting distracted by particular things you can see.) Now watch your visual field as if it’s a movie—a slow-moving movie, perhaps, but one of those quiet, visually rich, artistic ones. Just keep watching. When you stop because you have gotten caught up in thinking, note that you have tuned out the “movie” because it’s boring, or because you think you know what’s going to happen next. Ask yourself, “When I really stop to look, is anything truly boring? Do I really know what’s going to happen next?”

mtalantikite 5y ago

Well, if you want to meditate on multi-layered themes, there's always the wild fox koan [1]. As others have noted, concentration in and of itself is not all of what meditation is. There are so many different sorts of practice traditions. In some practices there isn't an object of concentration at all, for instance in Mahamudra's teaching of samatha [2]. And you're certainly right that meditation can lead to unhealthy mental states, which is why it's important to work with a teacher or a practice tradition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_fox_koan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_fox_koan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahamudra#%C5%9Aamatha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahamudra#%C5%9Aamatha

damontal 5y ago

Sam Harris kinda does this in his guided meditations. At times he asks you to sit in a noisy public place. His aim seems to be to to try to get you to quickly turn your attention on the thing that is currently doing the noticing. The point being a realization that there’s nothing there when you try to turn your attention to it. And that’s supposed to produce some kind of realization. Never worked for me in practice.

tacoman 5y ago
Same here. I have been trying to understand this practice for years and have never succeeded. Maybe someday it will click.
i_like_apis 5y ago
I believe there is an exercise benefit to meditation in noisy environments, as one form of practice. Swamy Vivekananda preferred meditating in a room with loud street noise in his youth. I used to have a coworker who would work while listening to stuff like Aphex Twin specifically to exercise his ability to focus. Personally my programming output would suffer but I think there's something to the exercise.

dbtc 5y ago

Yeah in the vipassana tradition check out 'Mahasi style noting'. In Zen, look up 'do nothing' or 'just sitting' - I don't know the traditional language. Shinzen Young has really good content on youtube IMO. Focusing on a single point is called 'anapana' in the vipassana tradition and is used as a way to calm the mind - like sharpening a knife - before moving on the the juicier stuff. It's sort of paradoxical but by giving attention to every passing thought/sensation, eventually they slow down and everything becomes much calmer, quieter, and clear.

lanstin 5y ago
Shikantaza is the traditional Japanese for just sitting in Zen. The approaches of increasing ones ability to focus awareness or openning awareness of all salient reality flow back and forth as one practises.
kranner 5y ago
Anapana(sati) is a specific kind of onepointedness exercise on following the breath; there are many, many more. (Literally, āna is inbreath, āpāna is outbreath, sati is 'remembering of'). What the (Goenka) Vipassana tradition teaches as Anapanasati is an overly specific extrapolated reading not supported by the Anapanasati Sutta itself. Scholar/monk Bhikku Analayo has published on this topic extensively. Many others have actually. The sutta itself is so vague that you can interpret it in any number of ways. Thai Forest Bhikku Buddhadasa even managed to fit Pranayama-like active breathing into his teaching of this sutta.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

waserwill 5y ago

This is maybe similar to some Jewish equivalents to mediation. The focus is ultimately on better action (the concept of commandments places an emphasis on doing over having the correct mindset or beliefs). These forms of meditation range from contemplative (of the characteristics of G-d, mystical concepts, etc.) to self improving (e.g. going out alone in nature and just saying to G-d whatever comes to mind, or visualizing what one learned to engage again in the topic, for understanding or building virtues). Jewish prayer and study can also be meditative, and can be either communal or secluded, verbalized or silent. [0] [1] There are certainly parallels in other Western traditions, particularly in Sufism [2] [3]. Personally, I think that the most effective form would be the one closest to a person's tradition; ideally, meditation is a practice that's embedded in a wider setting (of legends, language, ideas). Some more info: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitbodedut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitbodedut [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_meditation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muraqabah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muraqabah [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm

welshwelsh 5y ago

I would not say that meditation is about eliminating thoughts from the mind. That might not even be possible. It is more about setting intentions and sticking to them. For example, I might have some thoughts that are rooted in a specific desire. Perhaps I feel an urge to see what's new on Hacker News. I already did that 15 minutes ago, but so what. I'm thinking about what a great feeling it was last time I found something cool on this site. So I stop what I'm doing, navigate to Hacker News and proceed to waste 45 minutes reading through comment threads. Of course, there's another option. I could simply ignore the desire and do something else- like whatever it is I had otherwise planned to do with that time. But this is not so easy. Chances are, I will succumb to the desire and then rationalize to myself that this is, in fact, how I planned to spend my evening the whole time. With meditation, we practice by setting an unusual and specific intention, such as monitoring the breath. That way, if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, such as walking around, planning your weekend or replaying some event in your mind, you know that you are not doing what you intended to be doing. By returning to what you originally intended to do, you strengthen your ability to behave in an intentional manner, rather than being powerlessly yanked around by whatever idea happens to pop into your head at any given moment. I'm not sure whether meditating for very long periods of time is healthy. But most of us struggle greatly to do it for even 10 minutes. That's because 10 minutes is longer than our attention span: even if we firmly resolve to pay attention to something for that long, we inevitably get distracted by something else within a minute or two, and completely forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Don't you think that's troubling?

fellendrone 5y ago

> I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously This is basically ADHD, and whilst it has its advantages, wouldn't recommend it in general. The extreme of this might be psychedelics. A useful experience, but not necessarily something you want day to day. Thoughts are a tool. They're like mind software. The point of meditation isn't to stop thinking, it's to decouple yourself from them and see them from an outside perspective. In the process, perceiving that "you" are not your thoughts or your mind, and therefore direct the mind more effectively. It's a bit like closing background processes and gaining back resources. Those thoughts take resources to 'run', and many of them are constantly spawning new ones. When you turn your awareness on these processes, rather than them running ad hoc in the background, you can understand your self more and direct yourself better. The competing processes reintegrate. Or perhaps it's like an unruly dog that's constantly pulling you this way or that, but you're so used to it you don't even know it's unruly. Then you start to train it, and sooner or later you become a unit, working in coordination. Neurologically, it's likely modulating the default network, which some theorise is the neural correlate of the ego/self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network > Meditation – Structural changes in areas of the DMN such as the temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus have been found in meditation practitioners. There is reduced activation and reduced functional connectivity of the DMN in long-term practitioners. Various forms of nondirective meditation, including Transcendental Meditation and Acem Meditation, have been found to activate the DMN.

tshaddox 5y ago

I know very little about meditation, but it seems to me that a goal could be to develop awareness of and perhaps even more control over one’s thoughts, and that emptying one’s mind might be a useful exercise even when the goal is not to have a permanently empty mind. Kinda like how the goal of weightlifting usually isn’t to be able to permanently carry around heavy weights all the time.

fy20 5y ago

For me meditation is mostly about calming the mind (and body - sitting and focusing on your breathing will slow your heart rate), so that I can then focus on what is important throughout the day. Imagine you wake up and spend 30 minutes on your phone before struggling out of bed, then watch TV while eating reheated leftovers for breakfast, then rush off to work because you didn't realise the time. By the time you sit down at your desk you are going to have all sorts of nonsense thoughts going around your mind and have a really hard time focussing. Compare that to waking up, putting on calming music and making your favourite breakfast and fresh coffee, then consciously enjoying that while staring out the window at nature. After that, when you get to work you are going to much calmer. For me, meditation allows me to be in the later state even when I don't have time or the possibility to have my day start like that. Even if you do start with the calming day, you are still going to have some nonsense thoughts, but meditation allows you to train your mind to reduce them and focus on what is important to you.

dorfsmay 5y ago

This is like saying sleeping is a "waste of time, how can I be more productive during my sleep?". "clearing the mind", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more). Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation. I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state. [1]: https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Shamatha#Shamatha_without_an_Object https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Shamatha#Shamatha_... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU