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We are made of molecules and our thoughts are simply chemical reactions. The biological basis for the mind and thoughts are not well understood today. Meditatio

We are made of molecules and our thoughts are simply chemical reactions. The biological basis for the mind and thoughts are not well understood today. Meditation is a time-tested way to influence our body's chemistry in ways that discourage agitation, reduce anxiety and increase clarity. Just don't take it too far and hope to discover the meaning of life. Meditating for long hours is serious business and should be compared to pro-sports (in terms of commitment, training and potential injury). You wouldn't train like an athlete just to stay healthy, similarly you shouldn't meditate like its the end of the world.

akomtu 5y ago
Someone observing Earth at distance might make a similar conclusion that humanity is made of humans and the apparent intelligence of humanity as a whole is solely the result of humans bouncing into each other.
WJW 5y ago
> Just don't take it too far and hope to discover the meaning of life. In particular, reducing agitation and anxiety is great, but that meditation can make you more tranquil does not mean it can make you infinitely tranquil no matter how hard you try. Training the high jump will allow you to make higher jumps, but even a lot of high jump training will not teach you to fly.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  It can definitely shift the baseline to utter bliss for periods of months. (personal experience) and permanently according to some.
- dmje 5y ago
  It's a common misunderstanding that meditation leads to tranquility, that you somehow become a calm person. In the moment it does, but the bigger picture is that it gives you tools to deal with life with more equanimity and balance. The offshoot might be a sense of calm but it's an effect rather than a cause. The "infinitely tranquil" thing needs some unpacking too, mainly because it's not exactly easy to define what that means... Are there people whose whole life has been hugely and meaningfully improved through the practice of meditation? Yes, absolutely. This in my opinion is enough. We don't always need to fly.
  - touisteur 5y ago
    For some trauma-laden people, meditation can be quite a (bad) trip. I used to have horrible trauma flashbacks during meditation sessions. I would be getting into a calmer state, able to let go of anxiety, stress, daily minute thoughts, and after some quiet time, I'd be in a terrible state, with horrible memories surfacing. I definitely recommend not doing it alone if your childhood was painful. Same for yoga and long poses. One of the things I really hated with covid is the 'let's do zoom yoga' WTF ? Can't tell how many times in yoga sessions I needed 'help' because I was no more there but in a (very) bad place. I'm not sure it happens to other people. Therapy helps, but I wish I'd been warned before starting on the meditation journey.
    - rendx 5y ago
      Yes. See also https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787 https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practice... "Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation ― practiced without an awareness of trauma ― can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization."
      - touisteur 5y ago
        Thanks for this confirmation and reference.
    - jimkri 5y ago
      I'm not sure if you were doing guided meditation at the time, but that has really helped me. I do know what you mean about having trauma flashbacks, and you can get stuck in this loop. Meditation has thought me to not attach, recognize the thought, and start over. I use Waking Up with Sam Harris and I think that has really helped me from not attaching to the thoughts when they come up, and he will usually come back and refocus me.
      - 5y ago
bshepard 5y ago
"If, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recognize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there is no reason to suppose that such structures—even those that provide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational argument—have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle). A still more important consideration, however, is that naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.” Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.
- hibernator149 5y ago
  The only way to perceive actual reality and truth is to be magically endowed with this ability? The author of this quote can't imagine how this ability might result from evolution? Personal incredulity does not count as proof. Naturalism is our only chance for understanding this world, everything else is just magical thinking without proof.
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    Do you have the magical ability to see, hear, and otherwise perceive reality? It's one thing to have sensory perceptions, it's another to consider them all somehow connected, and it's entirely another to do so while ruling out any other forms of perception which may not be known to you yet.
davidhs 5y ago
You are a simulated person running inside a simulated universe that is being simulated on a physical brain inside a physical human inside a physical universe. With meditation you can learn for example how to turn off your simulated self. With certain psychoactive substances you alter the dynamics of your physical brain which causes it to simulate a somewhat different universe.

akomtu 5y ago

Someone observing Earth at distance might make a similar conclusion that humanity is made of humans and the apparent intelligence of humanity as a whole is solely the result of humans bouncing into each other.

WJW 5y ago

> Just don't take it too far and hope to discover the meaning of life. In particular, reducing agitation and anxiety is great, but that meditation can make you more tranquil does not mean it can make you infinitely tranquil no matter how hard you try. Training the high jump will allow you to make higher jumps, but even a lot of high jump training will not teach you to fly.

nnoitra 5y ago
It can definitely shift the baseline to utter bliss for periods of months. (personal experience) and permanently according to some.
dmje 5y ago
It's a common misunderstanding that meditation leads to tranquility, that you somehow become a calm person. In the moment it does, but the bigger picture is that it gives you tools to deal with life with more equanimity and balance. The offshoot might be a sense of calm but it's an effect rather than a cause. The "infinitely tranquil" thing needs some unpacking too, mainly because it's not exactly easy to define what that means... Are there people whose whole life has been hugely and meaningfully improved through the practice of meditation? Yes, absolutely. This in my opinion is enough. We don't always need to fly.
- touisteur 5y ago
  For some trauma-laden people, meditation can be quite a (bad) trip. I used to have horrible trauma flashbacks during meditation sessions. I would be getting into a calmer state, able to let go of anxiety, stress, daily minute thoughts, and after some quiet time, I'd be in a terrible state, with horrible memories surfacing. I definitely recommend not doing it alone if your childhood was painful. Same for yoga and long poses. One of the things I really hated with covid is the 'let's do zoom yoga' WTF ? Can't tell how many times in yoga sessions I needed 'help' because I was no more there but in a (very) bad place. I'm not sure it happens to other people. Therapy helps, but I wish I'd been warned before starting on the meditation journey.
  - rendx 5y ago
    Yes. See also https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practices-Transformative-Healing/dp/0393709787 https://www.amazon.com/Trauma-Sensitive-Mindfulness-Practice... "Drawing on a decade of research and clinical experience, psychotherapist and educator David Treleaven shows that mindfulness meditation ― practiced without an awareness of trauma ― can exacerbate symptoms of traumatic stress. Instructed to pay close, sustained attention to their inner world, survivors can experience flashbacks, dissociation, and even retraumatization."
    - touisteur 5y ago
      Thanks for this confirmation and reference.
  - jimkri 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you were doing guided meditation at the time, but that has really helped me. I do know what you mean about having trauma flashbacks, and you can get stuck in this loop. Meditation has thought me to not attach, recognize the thought, and start over. I use Waking Up with Sam Harris and I think that has really helped me from not attaching to the thoughts when they come up, and he will usually come back and refocus me.
    - 5y ago

bshepard 5y ago

"If, moreover, naturalism is correct (however implausible that is), and if consciousness is then an essentially material phenomenon, then there is no reason to believe that our minds, having evolved purely through natural selection, could possibly be capable of knowing what is or is not true about reality as a whole. Our brains may necessarily have equipped us to recognize certain sorts of physical objects around us and enabled us to react to them; but, beyond that, we can assume only that nature will have selected just those behaviors in us most conducive to our survival, along with whatever structures of thought and belief might be essentially or accidentally associated with them, and there is no reason to suppose that such structures—even those that provide us with our notions of what constitutes a sound rational argument—have access to any abstract “truth” about the totality of things. This yields the delightful paradox that, if naturalism is true as a picture of reality, it is necessarily false as a philosophical precept; for no one’s belief in the truth of naturalism could correspond to reality except through a shocking coincidence (or, better, a miracle). A still more important consideration, however, is that naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever; and anyone who imagines that it is susceptible of a natural explanation simply has no grasp of what the question of existence really is. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in the terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all.” Excerpt From: David Bentley Hart. “The Experience of God.

hibernator149 5y ago
The only way to perceive actual reality and truth is to be magically endowed with this ability? The author of this quote can't imagine how this ability might result from evolution? Personal incredulity does not count as proof. Naturalism is our only chance for understanding this world, everything else is just magical thinking without proof.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Do you have the magical ability to see, hear, and otherwise perceive reality? It's one thing to have sensory perceptions, it's another to consider them all somehow connected, and it's entirely another to do so while ruling out any other forms of perception which may not be known to you yet.

davidhs 5y ago

You are a simulated person running inside a simulated universe that is being simulated on a physical brain inside a physical human inside a physical universe. With meditation you can learn for example how to turn off your simulated self. With certain psychoactive substances you alter the dynamics of your physical brain which causes it to simulate a somewhat different universe.