So reading through this it's kind of interesting to look between the lines. There has always been vapid social vampires in our midst that would leech from others around them in any way that they could. It could be in monetary support, social and emotional support etc... And these vampires would do it naturally never thinking to give anything in return. The rise of the selfie cam and social media has created even more of these vampires.
Now when I read this article about mindfulness promoting selfishness what I actually see is people who are preyed upon by these vampires stop being prey when they embrace mindfulness. I suppose when you are the vampire and you are no longer to Leach your happiness from others you would consider that other person selfish. In reality this is more that people embracing mindfulness are incredibly attuned to their surroundings and the people that they interact with and realize what's happening and simply are holding up a mirror. These social vampires like the vampires of fantasy see nothing and thus call other selfish for refusal to be prey.
How do you draw that conclusion when the study says:
"Experiments 2a-2c found that induced state mindfulness reduced the willingness to engage in reparative behaviors in normally guilt-inducing situations."
This is about people who has has wronged others becoming less likely to make up for it after practicing mindfulness. Meaning, this is about mindfulness making more vapid social vampires who just take without giving back since it reduces guilt, not about people being more resistant to them.
Not to make any assumptions one way or another, but both the article's conclusions and your rebuttal are predicated on the initial feelings of guilt stemming from a genuine wrong.
If we posit instead that the guilt stemmed from a bad faith interaction initiated by a 'vapid social vampire', then correctly rejecting the guilt would be consistent with rejecting said vampires.
Ie. the truth of the grandparent's comment has no bearing on the results of this study (only its interpretation) or vice versa.
Mindfulness and compassion are often talked of as "two wings of a bird" by dharma teachers - mindfulness doesn't automatically translate to compassion. This sutta makes the same point:
Maṇibhadda Sutta (SN 10:4)
On one occasion the Blessed One was staying among the Magadhans at the Jewel-stand Shrine, the haunt of the yakkha-spirit, Maṇibhadda [Auspicious Jewel].
Then Maṇibhadda the yakkha-spirit went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, recited this verse:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful.
The mindful one prospers happily—always.
The mindful one grows better each day
and is totally freed from animosity.”
The Buddha:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful.
The mindful one prospers happily always.
The mindful one grows better each day
but isn’t totally freed from animosity.
Whoever’s heart, all day, all night,
delights in harmlessness
with goodwill for all beings
My issue with this specific concept is that lots and lots of people are lazy and instead of doing compassionate things, they "feel compassion" as a generic emotion through the use of meditation.
I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.
The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.
And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.
This has broadly been my experience of secular meditation also, I haven’t explored any other schools.
What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”.
I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.
Yes, something about living in the moment and responding skillfully and helpfully naturally. Doing those things naturally is what takes practice, you just don't get practice exercising those compassion-action responses if you only do mantras in your own home and it remains entirely theoretical.
I suppose it's fair that in some senses "enlightenment" is orthogonal to "being good" if you use some systems of analysis. By that logic monks sequestered in a monastery are doing something important (?) even if there's little measurable impact of their work on the world around them. I have issues with that logic, I think "to whom" is important and if the answer is "to the person doing it" I'm not sure compassion is really the right adjective anymore.
Of course, translation challenges abound in this area of discussion.
Yeah fair. I asked a teacher once, "seems like Buddhists don't have the best record at service, should I be concerned about that?" and he just replied "yes."
That said, I wouldn't be dismissive about people learning to forgive themselves for their flaws ...
Nah, I'm not dismissive of it, it is extremely important. Self-love is critical to be able to love others. Still, my point is that compassion and actually helping people should be taught in parallel. It is better in a Sangha, of course, at least mutually.
Consider the story of Buddha’s Dog as my go-to story about how Buddhists are definitely saying you need to actually take action to help people in the world for your own self improvement, it's not enough to just feel sad about things and "want to help".
If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food,
and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?
I think this is partially due to meditation being strongly associated in Western culture with New Thought [1] type movements. This diverse movement is the inspiration for most of the modern self-help ideology. As the quotes from William James in that article mention, the basis is "Mind-Cure", or the idea that thinking the right thoughts leads to physically healing the body.
Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.
Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.
Is this not just magic thinking? People used to (and, in many parts of the world, still do) believe in blessings/curses, magic rites etc. People believing in manifestation of thoughts in the body or the external world seems to me like magic just found a way back into our daily lives.
You're quite right, and it's something that has basically caused me to stop talking about my vipassana practice to people I befriend unless they bring it up first. When mentioning meditation or mindfulness practice, there are 2 types of people: those who say "yeah, that's nice, I should probably try that out some time" and nod along, and those who say "yeah, I did 16 self-affirmations today and visualised a new car, and listen to how it lines up with my horoscope..."
Mindfulness practice at its core is super simple, there's not much to talk about, but it's been completely associated with the self-help movement to the point that most people can't distinguish it from nonsense.
I suspect the result shown here is part of the broader tendency for people to only adopt the parts of things that make them "feel better".
Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.
The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.
There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.
10-20 minutes/day was enough to teach me how to be 'mindful' on demand and mitigated a lot of mild ADHD-type problems in my life (impatience, anger, finding queues unbearable, high sensitivity to noise etc.).
I spent a few months doing more, and it may not be related, but I became increasingly detached from the outside world, more self-absorbed and less motivated. Spent a lot of time just sitting and being content with nothing, which made me question why I should strive for -anything-. Always focused on improving myself, and the way I thought and felt, but it kept me stuck in my own head and not engaged with other people. There is a benefit in doing loving kindness and other forms of meditation that connect you with others.
Quite often I find that Man suffers only because a second Man finds joy in the suffering of the first. Detachment will serve you well in alleviating the suffering that would otherwise arise from the uncaring, undirected whims of the universe, but will leave you unprepared at dealing with willful and directed malice.
In the spirit of curiosity and playfulness I would like to respond with a bold claim:
The distinction between self and other is simply a concept. Certainly useful in many situations, but ultimately just one perspective - one tool at the mind’s disposal.
One could reasonably argue this is the central teaching of Buddhism. Alan Watts helped articulate these ideas to western audiences in many of his lectures:
“You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things that happen to us rather than things that we do. In other words, we don’t assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape.
If you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware, also—in the same moment and at the same time—that you’re not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun.”
I will respond with a bold claim of my own: vague platitudes such as this are a great way to instill a sense of learned helplessness that rationalizes suffering as "just the way the world is" while failing to acknowledge that the world can be changed to reduce the causes of suffering and not merely reduce the personal effect of suffering. This helplessness is perpetuated by those in positions of power as a means of effective societal control, which is to say, those who would stand to lose the most if their adherents realized the truth about who is the source of their suffering.
To summarize the video: Not caring is neither good nor bad, it's just a very common outcome of successful meditation practice. It means it's time to go play the game of life with your newly matured observing mind, and to identify your karmas and complete them.
Kind of disappointed that the advice is basically "become spiritual, do your karmas, then you have a higher meaning to your life". So anyone who isn't spiritual should just stay depressed? My brain is incapable of thinking spiritually. There must be a way to achieve higher meaning to life, but I guess I'll have to look to others for guidance there.
Not the OP, but I've started a morning routine of meditating for ~10 mins, brushing my teeth, journaling, a short yoga and doing misc morning chores (make coffee feed dog etc).
I would say the "routine" aspect of these has been so much more impactful than any of the actual individual things that I'm doing. I'm sure 10 mins of yoga/meditation is better than doing 0 but it's nothing life changing. One of the issues with ADHD-like symptoms for me was inconsistency. Having a morning routine sets up consistency and a system within which I know exactly what I need to do to "succeed" for the day.
Reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear helped me actually turn these things into habits.
10 minutes breath meditation each day (usually halfway through the work day). It doesn't matter how you do it so much as just being consistent for a long time.
Besides the 10 minute morning breathing meditation exercise I constantly strive to be in the moment by manually breathing during the day. This especially helpful in stressful situations.
EDIT
Also consider the progressive muscle relaxation meditation technique. It greatly helps with anxiety and I still benefit from it today even though I did only for a few months about 4 years ago. I can recognize when I am tensing up due to anxiety and immediately relax myself.
I think Sam Harris has talked about this, but I can’t find it now so maybe my memory is bad. I think he called them zen bums. It was people who want to do nothing else except meditate all day, every day.
mindfulness is a buzzword. It can mean different things for different people, there's only an internal definition per person. People are always selfish. Selfishness should be in a balance.
Breath mindfulness can sharpen your blade, but it won't tell you when or why to use your blade. I present Axelrod as a modern pop culture representation of that.
"God is dead. God is dead, and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of the deed?"
You mean, by coming in tune with ones own body and mind people start to value themselves? Call me shocked!
In all seriousness, people who know what they want tend to come across as selfish. I don’t know why people consider this bad. All airlines tell you to put on your masks, before helping others (in their emergency videos). The idea being, you must be capable in order to help others.
I think this is something many altruists miss. Society is best when everyone is healthy and capable. Teach a man to fish, as opposed to giving him a fish, so to speak.
I agree in principle, but anecdotally, I've seen lots wealthy folks in California get very into mindfulness which makes them feel great about themselves and feel more enlightened, but they do absolutely nothing to help others in any way. They only seem to become more self absorbed. Actually, it's not just wealthy people, I've seen it happen to poor folks who get into that too.
The headline gave me the same initial thought. I assume the experiment controlled for this, but so much of the mindfulness stuff is associated with self-optimizing hustle culture types that it seemed obvious to me it would correlate with higher-than-baseline selfish behavior.
"Selfish" is a sloppy word that combines unlike things. Which means it's a toxic word.
People should be self-interested. We are organisms, after all. Like animals.
However, people should not be fixated on their own self-interest to the point that they neglect the bigger picture. If you neglect the bigger picture, you will not be successful at being self-interested.
For example, if you neglect your spouse's feelings, people will say you're being "selfish." But you aren't being self-interested, because you aren't promoting a good life for yourself.
For a good critique of altruism, which is really a separate topic, see Ayn Rand.
This would line up with a broader trend I've noticed and would be interested in reading more about: the use of pop psychology to justify antisocial behavior.
Ten years ago, telling a distressed friend you don't feel like hearing about their problems would be incredibly rude. Now you can find NYT articles explaining how to couch the same sentiment in more acceptable terms like, "I don't have the bandwidth to perform that kind of emotional labor right now."
Same thing here. Telling a person you wronged to "get over it" is unacceptable. Telling them that you've been working on letting go of negative feelings about the past and being more mindful of the present, and you hope they can do the same? Well if anyone has a problem with that, you don't need that kind of energy in your life!
Sounds like they are not able to shoulder responsibility for errors made in the past. It's not hard to do usually - a heartfelt apology takes a few seconds and can turn a relationship completely around.
I've noticed this as well. There's a really great, growing trend of people understanding abusive behaviors and setting boundaries, which I think is fantastic. People should always stand up for themselves! But too far and you become like you've described.
You'd probably enjoy reading Christopher Lasch's "The Culture of Narcissism". It makes all sort of great points about yesterday's hippies' and pop culture personalities' ability to recycle their (frankly) egomaniacal tendencies, and analyzes what gave rise to those in the first place (material abundance, mass media, "youth culture", etc.).
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
I think in that case, being in San Francisco, if you stopped to engage every crazy person you saw, it's all you'd be doing with your life and would probably end of covered in shit or stabbed. Engaging crazies in the homeless capitol of the world is dangerous and likely pointless.
I believe you, but if there's any situation in which people should perhaps practice a more compassionate response, that was it.
Imagine if everyone had that response... I know it's fantasy, but I think that if you're studying mindfulness and compassion that's at least the direction you might want to be heading.
"Chris was murdered in San Francisco on the evening of Nov, 17, 1979 as he left the San Francisco Zen Center. According to witnesses, Chris was robbed and then stabbed by two strangers near the corner of Haight and Octavia streets. He died shortly after the assault."
Seems like an unfair standard to hold for these people over any other people.
Very few people are equipped to handle crazy people on the street, even among people who are trying to become better people, whatever that may mean to them.
You yourself attended the seminar on "loving-kindness" but couldn't resist dunking on these people some time later. But the thing is that I don't consider that inconsistent just because you were trying to improve yourself.
Even if the seminar were about helping crazy people that were standing in front of self-help seminars, it's still an unfair standard.
This happens even at large zen monasteries. Truth is, Buddhism has no mechanism for distinguishing between mental illness and the usual suffering all samsaric beings experience. Therefore, Buddhist teachers cannot deal with mental health emergencies: all mental suffering is seen through the Buddhist lens
I've seen this too; guy had a bipolar episode. Teacher told him he'd ruined everything, and would have to start again.
More generally, Buddhist medicine would be a good thing, as Ghandi might have put it. The heart of Buddhist medicine is that life is short, suffering is unavoidable, and that the best treatment is to teach and practice Buddhism.
Something like this occurred at my buddhist temple during a meditation, except it was one of the members who collapsed. Someone went over help and the rest of us... couldn't do anything more. An ambulance was called. they got medical treatment.
Should we have collectively wrung our hands? To what end?
The point here isn't averting your eyes in the face of suffering, it's about correctly judging the situation and taking only effective action. Collectively performing impotent empathy isn't any more useful to the ailing person than quietly sitting and sending them prayers/lovingkindness/whatever.
I didn't expect everyone to jump into action and mill around pointlessly, I expected them to pause long enough to help me, a newcomer to town, contact people who were trained to help...
And to be clear, I mean this as an example and a warning to not get too disconnected from the physical world while doing these meditations. They were all as friendly of people as any others I met in a city, it was the context that made it stick out in my mind.
In my entire life, meeting people from all walks of life (including people I vehemently disagree with, and some I would almost consider enemies, and even some zen Buddhists), when it came to the crunch, I know they/we would all have run towards an emergency as humans/neighbours.
On the other hand, let me assume it's true, then it isn't representative IME.
Have you lived in a large city with a very apparent homelessness crisis, such as san francisco?
The homeless in places like SF are routinely experiencing serious emergencies, invariably need money and shelter, and are passed by tens of thousands of people each day who have the abilities to help them.
Of those tens of thousands of people who pass a homeless person who's clearly in need of help, perhaps 100 will give them some money, perhaps 5 will pause to ask if they can help, and perhaps 1 will actually take a not-insignificant amount of time to try and assist them.
These numbers are certainly not perfectly accurate, but from the people-watching I've done in the bay area, I can easily and confidently say that the average response to a stranger who has the class-signifiers of being homeless, even if that person appears to be having a seizure or other crisis, is to ignore them entirely.
I think my observations align closely with the parent comment's observation, and I absolutely believe it is representative of the people who go to meditation courses in the bay area.
It was a story that happened in San Francisco, I don't know what else to tell you. You can't decouple homelessness from the reasons why you might need to help someone in an emergency in that city.
Draw what lessons you will, or tell me that I'm making it up wholesale if you seriously think it's implausible if you feel the need. All I can say is that it happened and stood out as particularly strange to me. I didn't take cell phone video to prove it six years later to a stranger on the internet, I just wanted to know who to contact for help in an unfamiliar neighborhood and city.
What I took from the situation was that if you're going to seriously practice compassion in meditation it needs to also be coupled with action or else you end up getting disconnected and numb to the world around you. I don't blame anyone for their responses, and definitely don't judge them as bad people or anything. We're all human and the best of us are open-minded enough to our failings to improve.
I'm saying that if you're going to practice "feeling compassion" you should also practice acting on it. Otherwise when you need to act you will freeze. Acting on compassion is a reflex, a habit, a muscle that needs development as much as the ability to accept that you aren't perfect.
I’m not a fan of SF particularly, and there are some problems unique to it, but my experience has been that individuals treating the homeless as invisible non-persons is pretty universal. Have you observed this to be different elsewhere in some large city?
and how do you act after no longer being newly moved to San Francisco?
that incident was imprinted in you, but how has it worked out for you since?
my guess: you failed to learn anything because of course that focused seminar doesn't teach anything related to the kind of mental health emergencies that occur on San Francisco streets, and so thats a decent crutch for you to lean on to not engage with them yourself, overriden by your own self preservation instincts. or are you now a mental health case worker that responds to these instead of the police? or do you know how to call those groups now so that you aren't the confused bystander like when you first moved?
Putting a few numbers in your phone is something I did and would recommend to others in whatever city is relevant. These can of course come in handy regardless of whether you practice mindfulness meditation.
My point was that the context of a class on loving-kindness was especially jarring. I fully advocate for everyone to take a class on basic first aid and know who to contact in response to a few basic classes of emergency, that seems as basic as having clean water in your house in case of an earthquake.
I can perform CPR, stop blood loss within reason, or call someone that knows how to do things I don't. I'm very happy to take suggestions for other skills that should be commonly known to be good community members.
Sorry, I can't actually find a reasonable way to view that instagram post. Odd, I thought they used to be viewable without an account.
Assuming it's some stereotype about new age self-defined gurus, no, these were perfectly regular and generally friendly people. The situation was extremely odd, which is why I remember it.
Someone else suggested it might be because the state of mind in that situation was wrong for the task at hand. I think it's probably correct, in another context they would have taken immediate action to help but were in an unfamiliar role.
Over my career, I've also seen some variations of this theme.
A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contrast, the stress-reduction instructors were a wreck.
A friend and I used to go out to eat on a regular basis. He reasonably decided to change his diet to more healthy foods. For all I know, it did improve his health, but I did observe that at a ball game, he opted for a hamburger and then his body rebelled. He had lost the ability to eat commonplace foods.
Among meditators (of which I was one), I observed a heighten sensitivity to being knocked off kilter by anything or anyone that conflicted with the world view of the practitioner.
My friends who were into body building routinely lifted weights for many hours a week, but when suitcases or scuba tanks need to be carried, there a was strong aversion. I surmised that the unbalanced loads greatly threw-off how they had trained themselves to lift weights with good form.
Among Python programmers who use Black and isort in order to improve the appearance of code, it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable. Likewise, it is common to become highly judgmental of people who don't use that tooling (and even more so with type annotations where proponents seem to have an almost religious fervor).
I don't really know what conclusion to draw from these events, but there is something of interest going on.
Oh, thanks for this insight, it's a useful one to me.
I would totally believe that it was more an unpracticed response while in a relaxed and learning state of mind than anyone's actual underlying meanness, these were nice folks as far as I could tell otherwise. That one situation was just astoundingly weird.
And indeed, it wasn't a person in the class that responded, it was an assistant who had done the material many times. The teacher didn't seem to know what to do either, I think it may be as you say that the assistant just happened to be in a "run the stuff" state of mind rather than a "teach" or "listen/contemplate" state of mind.
That definitely would explain a lot, a mental context switch takes a significant amount of time and meditation absolutely can do that. It would also explain why I felt like a bit of an alien bringing it to anyone's attention, I had arrived ten minutes late from another activity so I wasn't "in the zone" yet.
At least, I've yet to hear a better explanation. I've attributed it to long ingrained habits showing up in class because in no other location with the same group (edit: not the same people, the same organization) did I encounter something similar. But that can certainly be coincidence.
I did point this disconnect out to the class, and I think any Buddhist would not take awareness of this response as a criticism rather than an observation and opportunity to improve. If any of us were perfect there'd be no need for a class in the first place.
> it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable
Before this tooling, my experience is that people are less tolerant of whatever isn't they prefer. If familiarity breeds readability, why not adopt a standard?
I also assume your characterisation is sensationalised to fit the comparison: all valid python is readable, but some can be read faster, and more importantly - errors are easier to spot, if its in a familiar format.
wrt the lifting scenario, I'd have to ask what "strong aversion" means; presumably good form is intended for situations that you repetitively lift weights, where long-term unbalanced lifting would cause damage. If that's not the case, maybe we should all lift with good form?
About fifteen years ago, my car broke down in the driveway of a Catholic Church before mass. I’d just pulled into the first driveway I could as my engine was overheating. Something like 40 cars rubbernecked past me under the hood of my car trying to add coolant, and not one stopped to ask if I needed help.
Since then I have realized I think very few people actually care about strangers beyond conspicuously appearing to for selfish reasons.
Why is this a surprise? It's a technique whose central tenet is to turn a person's attention inward, promoting it as therapy. I am sure it helps a subpopulation, but I'm definitely not in it.
Vipassana is insight meditation, not mindfulness and not really appropriate for beginners. The closest equivalent to mindfulness would be concentration, or samadhi.
One of the core practices of insight meditation (Vipassana) is to be mindful of your inner thoughts, like through "noting", and observe them through the lenses of the 3 characteristics. You use one-pointedness concentration (Samadhi) to tune into these thoughts. You can also do Samadhi without Vipassana, as many yogis have, but you cannot do Vipassana without a baseline concentration ability.
Some people use mindfulness meditation and Vipassana interchangeably, but it is not entirely accurate, yeah. Mindfulness is only one exercise of the broader insight meditation (Vipassana).
Funny how nobody addresses the main point, only that my 1-sentence executive summary is not accurate :-)
Main point is: if you start doing mindfulness exercises, you will eventually get into insight territory, and without a cushion of compassion this can mess you up.
I spent a year in a meditation center, and the results vary a lot from person to person, because what somebody needs right now in life is different from everybody else.
Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.
I don't even know if enlightening exist, to be honest.
For me, it doesn't matter. I don't need the promise of something potentially amazing in the future, I'm just interested in something that makes my life better right now.
In the center, I only met regular people with ordinary problems, even teachers. Getting a hang on suffering, one step at a time. Sometimes being completly off the mark, because humans are humans.
Meditation is also probably the most boring thing I ever encountered. It's unspectacular, tedious, slow and utterly mundane.
But it's the only thing that I've tried that brings consistent, increasing benefits in life.
I wish for everybody to find something that is as good for them, awakening or not.
I've spent a few years meditating most mornings and evenings and I'd hoped for more. No fireworks no bliss... feels like I'm not making much progress. But I've read about enough people experiencing much more I wonder where I'm going wrong
All the teachers I practiced with repeated to me: don't look for something special. Don't look for bliss. If bliss comes, don't pay attention to it. Bliss is not the aim of this meditation.
I don't know what meditation you are practicing, and there are so many of them I wouldn't be able to give any advice that would work with your own practice.
So I can't know if you are doing something wrong.
What I know, however, is that in the Vipassana meditation following Sayagyi U Ba Khin tradition, one would advice to focus on practice. There is no expectation. Nothing to achieve.
In this tradition, your role is to provide efforts, but one is not responsible for the result. Things are just rising and passing away. Suffering. Bliss. Anything else. Just appearing and disapearing.
Meditation is just the tool to help us live through that.
Peace is not bliss. Peace means you don't need bliss, nor are you hindered by suffering. Easier said than done, and that's why it's a long path.
It's a lifetime practice. You start again every day. One day, you realize you feel a bit more peaceful and happy than you used to. You smile. And you sit once again.
Have you read MCTB? I feel I'm still in stage 1, maybe 2, but definitely haven't reached the arising and passing away... Still, I find labelling useful. Going to try to find a Mahasi retreat
It is like living in a video game with the FOV slider turned to max. It has made me very good at "deep work" and I have a much easier time managing day to day stress and emotions. However, it brought out immense periods of suffering (dark night) followed by immense peace in cycles. The biggest inconvenience to me is the sleep disruptions, which is why I'm taking a break from deeper insight practice, and just try to maintain it, the same way a power lifter might just go to the gym for health reasons without trying to set a new PR.
If you have any interest in accessing a higher state of consciousness (or more accurately a flatter state of consciousness), it's an interesting hobby to pursue, kinda like being good at mental math.
Bound to happen. Why do you think Buddha has to leave all his wealth and kingdom before even starting the journey of mindfulness, leaving everything behind?
The western adaptation is reducing meditation and mindfulness to a "tool" of relieving stress and better ones mental well-being. As easy as downloading an app and stay calm for few minutes.
Unfortunately, this is not ideal. The traditional way is to seek a guru who asks the disciple to cleanse their heart first. Put them on the spiritual path of purifying the soul. Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey. Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Fortunately, for those who want to live in a society closely, they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane by helping others and following ones duty with high-integrity.
However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives. There are so many apps helping with the patterns of different breathing techniques.
But don't expect you or anyone to become a better person just by doing some mindfulness exercises. When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core, you will just highlight whats inside you more. I.e. if you are bad, you will get worse. Mindfulness has nothing to do with it but just amplifying what is already there as you discover yourself more through mindfulness.
I don't know that it's necessarily fair to describe this as a purely Western phenomenon. The Lamas were a hereditary elite who ruled over Tibet in a brutal caste system which reduced most of the people in it to the status of serfs, and all with their own particular strain of Buddhism used to justify and excuse it all. On our fridge, my wife has a picture of the Dalai Lama wearing a big fancy watch on his wrist. I always wonder how such a luxurious ostentation is supposed to fit in with what he preaches.
In a way, it is good for a famous spiritual leader to have obvious human flaws. I don't know too much about modern Buddhism but I don't think it would be good for Buddhists to worship their leader as being more than a mere mortal who might enjoy wearing a fancy watch.
It's a petty concern for someone who visits world leaders and maintain international relations at that level. It could be a conversation-starter in more unofficial moments, for fun (spiritual people are allowed 1 teaspoon of fun each day!) or just being practical.
These kinds of topics are unfortunately what the focus many will remain at.
generally speaking -- rolex collections don't spring up from practical reasons -- and he's known to purposely use cheap watch bands and flip the watch faces towards his wrists in an effort to hide them from view..
Great article, thanks. Can't fault a man for having a passion for mechanical watches, especially when as the article states he has disassembled / assembled some of them. I can only begin to imagine the fine motor and mental control required.
The man has to keep time, and has the money to throw at that... Ever seen the dude all distracted starting into an iphone? He has clearly done away with such worldly goods and isn't making a dime on that at all! [1]
It's not like the West doesn't have its own meditative and contemplative traditions. The Cynics and Stoics of the Classical world could have very diverse attitudes to wealth and material comforts, with the former being quite more disdainful of them and quite literally "living like dogs". We see the same thing in Western ascetic monasticism later on - some Western monks and nuns focus on helping others and doing their assigned duty in society, while others pursue a more focused spiritual and contemplative path.
and seneca the stoic had 300 million sestertii total net worth, compared to the ordinary yearly wage of 200 sestertii, give or take!
lots of rich religious folks out there in history. when they expropriated the buddhists in the huichang expropriation during the tang, they took tens of millions of acres of arable land and liberated 150,000 temple slaves
There's a passage by Chesterton where he jokes that many of his contemporaries had simply become bored with Christianity and would happily embrace it again if it came wrapped in the exotic garbs of a far away land.
An interesting anecdote I've experienced on this topic living abroad is how many Buddhists, in an almost exclusively Buddhist nation, have some degree of admiration for Christianity while having some degree of disdain for their own religion or philosophy.
I think it's the foreign aspect, but also another one is that when you have limited experience of what a casual Christian (or Buddhist) is like, it creates a falsely positive impression. Many of the Christians people in this country would be familiar with are a mixture of missionaries and people who came and did things like set up schools and hospitals for people at little to no cost. And, vice versa, Buddhists Americans are generally familiar with are going to be those genuinely interested in the pursuit for its own sake, rather than driven to such out of cultural inertia.
By contrast here you get daily news about things such as monks being busted running illegal gambling dens, and sometimes the rather more perverse. And there's also a culture associating various Buddhist icons with good luck which trends towards a complete bastardization and mockery of it as people try to literally use such for good luck. Think of something like the equivalent of a poker player praying to God 'Just one time, Jesus' while rubbing a crucifix. The various Buddhist "rituals" for good results during finals are well, not something that's going to exactly exemplify the moral pursuits of Buddhism.
Seeing people express something along the lines of the myth of the noble savage, when you're that savage and certainly not noble is quite interesting, and jading!
Yes, the sangha in natively Buddhist countries can be a rather mixed bag but that's just as true of the various churches and other religions in the West. These things are somewhat natural when you have a religion in a "popular" role.
> Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...
> they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane
Again, according to who? Why not Jesus? Or Scientology? What's your personal experience?
> However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives.
Well this is out of nowhere. It doesn't connect to anything that's been said. Do you do this?
> When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core
Inner core is new. What's that and who asked? Is it the same as a True Self?
I'd say let's just focus on this: "Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey." That's correct and all this issue needs. MBSR and the other sanitized, faith-cleansed scientifically quantifiable practices are not synonymous with mindfulness, meditation, or Buddhism. They're tangential, and for some they are nice greeters at the door to a path of spirituality.
Yeah. I know even living in B'lore you are blind to your own culture. The authentic breathing techniques are passed on by so many practitioners and time-tested, unlike modern western crap.
- Why not Jesus?
Because church bastardized Jesus so hard, they filled the whole fucking book with prruuuufs of his existence instead of teaching the essence of his thinking.
Stop wasting your time on Church and find better alternatives from the east.
I mean, mindfulness is literally about taking a few minutes off to concentrate on yourself. I bet people who go on longs walks in nature to reflect by themselves also increase their "selfish" tendencies.
Having lived in Boulder CO for several years, which is basically the Mecca of Americanized mindfulness, I can attest that this is true. The most ardent practitioners that I met were invariably self obsessed.
I spent a week in Denver and boulder and continuously got the eerie vibe that every person I met who moved there, is an example of the most self centered person I would have met in any other situation elsewhere. I suppose the type of young person who’d move to CO “for the outdoors” is gonna select for the trend. Everything, including the assholish cycling, was indicative of that. Noped out of that place for this reason.
Until I went to Colorado my only experience with people “into the outdoors” was in Canada (many from France) and they were some of the nicest, most considerate people I’ve ever met. But whatever I saw in Colorado (and to an extent in San Diego) has led me to believe that people who do move to these places in the US tend to be self centered, just my observation. Probably merely a correlation with deeper connections than causation.
Or perhaps those were the people you just happened to meet? I had a colleague in Boulder Colorado, very much into the outdoors, a vegan without pushing it on anyone, helpful and humble.
> Having lived in Boulder CO for several years, which is basically the Mecca of Americanized mindfulness, I can attest that this is true. The most ardent practitioners that I met were invariably self obsessed.
Over the years of living there I became even more intolerant with these people, I came from the Biodynamic Ag side of things so was pretty battle-hardened in the World of 'Becasue woo' to explain most things.
But, Boulder broke me... I realized that most in the US who heard about Steiner's work (I think most of it is BS from a conman) were treading the woke spectrum, affluent or not, but Boulder'ites were simply faking the most ostentatious facade: they would drive their Tesla to and from their mansions yet remain the most rude, stingiest, greedy people I have ever encountered--I'm from SoCal and I'm used to fake and rich people, but even I was stunned by the sheer numbers in just one relatively small town!
But because they practiced 'mindfulness' and had a pocket full of crystals and a yoga mat in tow they were somehow exempt from it all.
The worst were the mindful vegans and vegetarians, I did the most strictest form of renewable and regenerative forms of Ag, and had cooked mainly in historic towns with a long history of farm to table concepts--dating back 100s of years in the case of Italy.
But the absolute trite that left their mouth was stunning, I was incapable of speaking my mind as they were our clientele, but... the way these people speak with such authority about topics hey have no idea about is astonishing: most were professors from CU Boulder reminding you they have a post-doc BA in some unrelated topic, but they all have more in-depth knowledge about the intricacies of Human physiology than people who actually studied health sciences (I have a BSc in Cellular and Molecular Biology, became a Master Grower in Biodynamic Horticulture, and cooked/ran Farm to table concept kitchens and helped grow 75%+ of everything that was on my menu).
Personally speaking, my recent trip will likely be my last: the vapid and rich were always the shot-callers there, but it's with great sorrow that I admit just how shallow that place really is. All of the progress many of us dedicated a lot of our time and effort was undone in less than 3 years!
This comment was so cathartic to read lol. Yes it never even felt like a real town to me. It was like a playground for rich adults who want to look progressive and humble, but are fabulously well off. It's a beautiful, clean, crime free city and I hated it.
> It was like a playground for rich adults who want to look progressive and humble, but are fabulously well off
If they're from Boulder, it's just real-estate money; it wasn't anything based on merit, they just got in early.
> It's a beautiful, clean, crime free city and I hated it.
That is simply not the case, in fact this is one of the worst offending police states I have ever had the misfortune of having lived in. You want to see what makes people think Boulder is crime free, look at this case that had to be taken to the Supreme Court [0], because local courts allowed for the systematic abuse and torture of a woman who was supposed to be fined on Pearl Street Mall for just smoking.
It also is old and dirty place, I lived in an apartment that had to have all the asbestos removed in 2019! The town when left to it's own devices, as in devoid of it's massive underclass that keep it functional, descends into utter chaos: see CU Boulder riots in 2020.
It has a disgusting underbelly based fiefdom that is owned by Tebo and 5 families that all collude with each other; I used to feel bad for the people who tried to make a life their... but now I think they deserve what they get which is an over-priced, over-hyped Police State that has been over-populated to such an extent that it's nothing like when I first came and decided to move their (in my case 2007). Which is typical of most tech hubs.
This isn't nostalgia, so much it is a 'going clear,' I'm glad I got to live it in it's tech hey-day 2015-2020 as a founder, and still be able to live to tell about it (I used to go to the King Soopers on Table Mesa where that shooting took place) because from what I've seen COVID really left it's mark in a way that makes me ok with never going back.
I caught a guy trying to steal my catalytic convertor in April and ended up giving him the $10 I had in my pocket: the guy couldn't get food or a place to stay in town as it was over-filled with no where to go.
My friends still struggle to pay for rent on old over-valued apartment buildings to slumlords etc...
This is a town wherein it's 'legacy families' and Tebo own so much vacant land that they could have setup camps and shelters with minimal investment just to keep Pearl Street Mall from looking like a refugee camp and keep business going but did nothing instead. And this is the type of 'pride' this town has.
People assume this is a bad outcome, but in a society where "being true to one's authentic self" is promoted as the main virtue, one would be expected to embrace selfish behaviors if they reflect. It's a low-brow blending of Nietzsche and Rand, but marketed as proto-communist mysticism. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what the world owes you!
I don’t really get why this is evidence when it’s just asking an ethics question and having people “let their mind wander”. The context they mention is extremely important.
Practicing mindfulness is not just letting your mind wander. It’s practice, just like exercising or coding. You get better at it with time, not just a Homer Simpson moment of following your thoughts after being asked a question about being a decent human being.
The whole idea of mindfulness is to get to know yourself better and work on the not so great parts such as when your ego gets involved. If you practice it today and have found tremendous results, great! Also if you tried it and it didn’t help much, that’s okay too.
I’ll continue to do it because it’s what I believe separates good from great in my life and helps me accomplish more. I’m glad they mentioned this:
> “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
Whenever someone talks about mindfulness or stoicism, the name that pops to my head is Tim Ferris. Like a less crappier Joe Rogan with an actual brain maybe? I still listen to some of his podcast episodes because he gets guests who I want to learn about. But oh my god the narcissism! I get it the podcast is about success and how to succeed, but for the love of god try to take your head out of your own ass for a minute? I’ve listened to tens of hours if not hundreds and haven’t ever heard him talk about a single act of kindness or help he or his guests have ever done to strangers.
You know what he’ll bring up every day? Mindfulness or meditation or stoicism. Like buddy, if you can’t sleep it’s probably because you know you’re not a nice person deep down. No amount of meditation is gonna help that.
Selfishness is not narcissism. Narcissism usually comes with selfishness, but you can't induce the other way round. It's interesting that you mention that Ferriss or his guests wouldn't talk about their acts of kindness, as that's exactly the kind of thing narcissists like to talk about (= virtue signalling).
> It's interesting that you mention that Ferriss or his guests wouldn't talk about their acts of kindness, as that's exactly the kind of thing narcissists like to talk about
Hadn't heard of him, but as an [ex]scientist I'd be fascinated to see the actual data showing any correlation between "narcissist" and "entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru"[0]
Put slightly different, how many people who shy away from attention end up famous for their podcasts?
That’s kinda like asking what’s the boundary between having wheels and being an aeroplane. Most planes have wheels, but as a car you could add infinitely many wheels without turning into a plane.
God I can't stand that kind of BS. Thanks for warning me, I'll be sure to avoid him.
Both supply and demand for these motivational charlatans are immense. Something tells me it's not about actual drive to be successful, because the most successful people aren't listening/reading that crap, they're too busy practicing, learning, etc. Instead I think it's a self-misdiagnosis (there's something wrong with me, and it's my motivation) and then the charlatans confirm that by saying "yes, listen to me, I'll give you a short high of confidence, come back for more!".
In reality the success addicts just aren't passionate about anything, and that's ok. What they need is to either (a) find their passion, and that takes time, an open mind, and trying different things or (b) accept that they aren't passionate and enjoy life in other ways.
This seems like a weirdly vitriolic post. It's bursting with negative characterizations, (he's a narcissist, he's up his own ass, and that he's not a good person deep down) and the support you offer for these hateful words is... the fact that he doesn't talk about philanthropy?
I mean, it's not that he doesn't engage in philanthropy, because he does[0]. It's that he doesn't talk about philanthropy?
Is it possible--and I offer this in the spirit of friendship (mostly)--that you need to take your head out of your own ass for a minute?
I’m happy to take criticism of the tune of “head out anywhere”. Having said that if the best example of his philanthropy you could find is him donating all the money he made from Ukraine back to Ukraine, I hope you see the irony of it. He probably hoped to (and probably did) make more money by proclaiming this in public than actually sending.
Importantly, I didn’t use the word philanthropy because it’s clearly not the only or even a good way of helping people. It doesn’t even have to be strangers heck. The only time he and his guests discuss “not them” is when they could learn or extract something from said others.
This is a pretty weak example of philanthropy. Or a great prime example of what we consider philanthropy. Regardless the OP didn’t say philanthropy. They talked about general compassion. There is a lot that doesn’t overlap between the two.
Why don’t people generally call someone making $40K donation $10K philanthropy? It’s just charity. However Tim Ferris does some tepid Ukraine stuff and it’s philanthropy.
I understand exactly what you're talking about. I genuinely can't listen to ideological podcasters who are shitty people. I don't mean ideologies I disagree with, I mean people with no compassion who try to tell you how to live.
Good example: Tim Pool. He's ideologically pretty close to me, but I can't stand him as a person. No thanks.
How is Tim Ferriss ideological or a shitty person? I think he’s trying real hard and doesn’t stomp on people. His success is also quite hard earned IMO.
I've not read the book, but IIUC _The Four Hour Workweek_ has as its central idea that you can outsource most of your actual work to other people while accruing most of the wealth those others are creating.
Not exactly a mark of great compassion or kindness, if that's actually what's presented.
Well you can't scale a business if you rely on only yourself as the workforce, so you will at some point have to outsource work to other people. It doesn't matter where those people are located. It's certainly unkind to overwork or underpay people, no matter where they are in the world (which must be looked at relative to local salaries). But that's not at all what the book recommended.
We all profit off other people's work, and are profited off of. I personally don't find this inherently problematic, since it's not a zero sum game.
To reiterate my point: I think it's not per se unkind to profit off other people's work. It's all about _how_ it's done.
right, profiting from other people's labor is certainly not inherently wrong.
Collecting most of the income from a project while putting very little effort into it feels kind of skeezy to me, but I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what bothers me about that. There may not be any actual problems with it.
It goes deeper than that. He encourages this behaviour in all aspects of interactions - getting other people to look things up for you etc, while firewalling yourself from other people's requests for assistance, finding ways to be more efficient at your job and hiding this from your boss so you can use the time saving for your side hustle.
His business was selling generic "herbal remedies" IIRC. Which is bad/predatory IMO. And going further to meta-hustle that this is salutary enough to recommend to others without any seeming compunction is meta-bad.
(I know it's bad posting something this dismissive in deeply nested comments, but I believe it is relevant information to the discussion which hasn't been mentioned elsewhere. I tried elaborating but the elaborated versions of this comment were more cynical/uncharitable, not less, so I'm keeping it short instead).
Are you referring to BrainQuicken? They sold regular supplements, mainly B vitamins and alpha lipoic acid, marketed as nootropics (which they are). I can't see what's wrong or unethical about that. Unless you think all kinds of resale are unethical?
It appears my recollection was incorrect, and I retract my initial claim. Yeah, it was more nootropic than herbal. Yes, th "neural accelerator" that is "100% guaranteed to work within 60 minutes of the first dose." (http://www.blackhat.be/toxic/brainquicken.html is the closest thing I can find to what looks like the original marketing blurb). One should be highly skeptical of such claims, but frankly it's not as bad as it was in my memory (though still outlandish/over the top), and I'll make a note to not be quite so mean about him in future. Thanks for your comment.
I have no idea what you are hinting at. Making guesses at other people‘s intentions and spewing one-liners doesn’t exactly invite a discussion. If you don’t like to discuss, why post here?
> I’ve listened to tens of hours if not hundreds and haven’t ever heard him talk about a single act of kindness or help he or his guests have ever done to strangers.
In that case, you might want to listen to the episode with Will MacAskill (of effective altruism fame):
Many other guests who seem to be genuinely kind people come to mind as well (e.g., Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Debbie Millman) but it probably doesn't get any more obvious than with Will MacAskill that this show isn't about selfish or narcissistic endeavours.
How does having one guest or a couple guests who may be good people, change the general issue? A couple of people vs the majority doesn’t change the general sentiment.
It’s a common strategy for podcasters/big personalities and defenses of them to have examples of engaging with another side. Even those examples are few and far between compared to the norm. IE Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman having far more right wing or right wing sympathetic people than left wing people on their shows. That doesn’t mean anything bad in and of itself. The issue is acting like having at least one person from each side means the show and/or host are balanced unbiased people in this regard.
Well, that's not what the author of the parent comment wrote or seemed to imply.
As much as one example to the contrary might not automatically change a general sentiment or perception, one particular listener only having encountered what they perceive as narcissism or self-involved navel-gazing might just be down to sampling bias.
The point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples from that particular podcast where guests at least aren't entirely motivated by selfish or narcissistic pursuits.
Tim Ferriss’ primary value is that he was well-connected.
When he could land great podcast guests or interview subjects and let them speak it turned out great.
When he brought on certain friends or acquaintances and they tried to discuss something together with Tim’s input playing a large role, it was anywhere from boring to a disappointing mess. I haven’t listened to his podcast for years after he had a string of pseudoscience guests pushing easily debunked ideas. I vividly remember one where Tim was clearly uneasy with the obvious nonsense his guest was pushing but he wouldn’t dare push back or question anything for any reason. Really disappointing.
Tim Ferriss has always been like that, though. His whole personal brand was built on the idea that he interviewed world-class experts and delivered their knowledge to you. His old blog was almost exclusively “guest posts” which is another way of saying he got other people to write the blog for him (brilliant marketing move).
I've been meditating regularly for at least 10 years now. My own selfish tendencies have increased and decreased during that time, it doesn't seem related. I think meditating is rather selfish, it's doing something for yourself, and that's ok. I primarily meditate because it helps me focus. I think it helps me deal with stress and helps me sleep better. I don't attempt any particular pose as most of the cross legged stuff is painful and has caused injuries.
Can anyone actually say what “mindfulness” really means?
I once met a mindfulness coach who was trying to sell me on his business where he comes onsite and coaches corporate clients on mindfulness. The pitch broke down when he couldn’t articulate to me what the hell was really meant by mindfulness.
It's a bunch of different practices. At it's heart it just means paying attention all the time. The outcome depends on the motivation; it could be real insight, or power over others, or greater calmness.
There's no point in trying to teach mindfulness to people who just want a 5-minute de-stressing session. Mindfulness is work.
For many many years I was stuck inside my head. I had erected "walls" to protect myself and keep others out. Being afraid of coming off as weird, being worried about saying the wrong thing, afraid of being rejected, afraid of being assertive. So I would hide inside my head, keep to myself, and when people tried to get close to me (as in trying to be a close friend) I would instinctively push them away, in a sense, to keep my distance. When in social situations I would try to find any excuse to leave as quickly as possible because all I was thinking about was being worried about being awkward or weird or rejected.
At the same time, I became very distressed about being single and having very few friends.
I finally realized why I lacked friends and relationships, it was because I pushing people away. I also realized that the reason for this was because I was stuck inside my head, over analyzing everything, over thinking everything, making up problems in my head, being anxious, worried, and fearful about the past and the future.
So I found "mindfulness" as a way to escape my brain from the never ending loop of analyzing people and social situations, to stop trying to figure out people's hidden intentions, stop thinking about the past and the future. To live in the moment and let myself be me rather than hiding myself.
To me, mindfulness just means recognizing when my brain is a run-away train of thoughts and to not let it consume me. It's about getting outside of my head and into real life. For me, it's the difference of being safe but miserable or taking risks and potentially reaping rewards (friendships, relationships, new opportunities, etc.) The best way I can describe is the stereotypical/incorrect description of being an introvert vs being an extrovert.
- self-awareness, ie aware of your thoughts and feelings
- being present in the moment
- emotional regulation
I always use security guards as my example: you need to see what is actually there, not what you expect to be; you need to be aware of your own response, eg not panic or become angry; and you need to both be able to calm yourself and overcome your default not to act, as appropriate.
Mindfulness is something that emerges as a side-effect from meditation. Not something that you actively aim for. I'm going to have a lot of trouble putting it into words, since this is something I got from culture, and not from specific words. Bear with me.
Here is how it feels: the brain experiences stuff "objectively".
For example: if something happens and you get angry, instead of fully being angry, you get to see that you are angry. And now you get the choice to be angry or not. Or sometimes you don't get a choice, but can clearly see it and realize that it's something you have to go through. There emerges a clear separation between your brain, your emotions and the core you.
It's not something you do consciously, it's something that your brain does by itself all the time. Like fish noticing water. Things don't really change, but you get a perception to notice and see things.
An analogy I like to use is: You are playing a 2d game. Your character exists in a 2d world. But your perspective is 3d and can clearly see what's happening.
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P.S.
Since you seem to be curious, keep in mind that meditation is serious stuff and needs to be given respect. Using meditation for just feeling good is like using a gun to dig a hole. Can you do it? yeah. But without gun discipline, you may end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Meditation is a tool. It exists safely only within a larger ecosystem of other things. Prescribing meditation openly without the ecosystem is dangerous.
Once mindfulness comes, the problems get more and more subtle.
This is so subject to interpretation that it's almost meaningless. For example, consider the case of someone who takes up meditation and comes to the realization that they really hate their job. If they then quit their job and seek another position at the same or lower pay, are they being 'selfish'?
On the one hand, if they've bought into the notion that "we are all a family here" and that loyalty to their employer is like a familial obligation, and quitting their job is like abandoning an elderly relative on the street corner, then they may indeed be consumed by feelings of guilt and anxiety. Most observers would note that this is a false equivalency: the relationship between employer and employee is certainly not like that between parent and child.
One could likewise argue that quitting a job one hates is actually altruistic, as there are people who might like that job and if one's workplace is full of people who like what they're doing, it makes it a much more pleasant environment. Additionally, people who hate their jobs are known to take out their frustrations on family members, which is an unpleasant situation, so quitting a job one hates, even if it results in a somewhat lower standard of living, is not at all selfish - assuming one can find another job, and the end result is not poverty/homelessness.
Meditation would seem to be beneficial in any case. Some people don't even recognize that they hate their job as much as they do, and perhaps some internal reflection can suggest some changes that can be made to make the situation at least tolerable.
Incidentally, attempting to use things like guilt to motivate people to be obedient is a very unhealthy and Machiavellian tactic, and if 'mindfulness' helps people to break out of such situations, then the more the better.
100% agreed. Somehow this article manages to redefine mindfulness as just convincing yourself to feel no guilt for anything (“In general, mindfulness seems to calm uncomfortable feelings” is a direct quote from the article, and most subsequent conclusions are drawn from that statement). That’s not mindfulness, that’s just being a narcissist sociopath.
I don't really understand or agree with their focus on guilt as a motivator. They claim that a reduction in feelings of guilt led to a reduction in sincerity of apology.
> The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends
Personally, I would say a sincere apology would be motivated by a person's objective belief that they had done wrong, not by their desire to soothe their feelings of guilt. But the whole situation seems of dubious value, as the person is being requested to write an apology (vs. offering one of their own motivation), and to a person they feel most guilty towards. In other words, this study seems pre-constructed (intentionally or not) to produce these results...
It's so typical of the rapid, results-oriented, outcome-focused world that we live in that McMindfulness has dashed into the forefront of popularity; oh look, I'll just ignore the last 2500 years of learning and sit on a cushion for 20 minutes a day for 6 months and, bang, I'm enlightened!
Meditation is not about meditation. It's not about your time that you're on the cushion. Any good teacher points this out again and again. Meditation is about life, it's about Metta, it's about understanding your place in the world. It isn't about progress, or happiness, or being calm. It isn't a fad, to be dropped for something different when that becomes the next popular thing on Instagram. It's deeper than that, more central, more vibrant, longer, simpler - but harder! This is a journey of a lifetime, not a happy pill.
The whole context is stacked full of nuance - which, to be fair, the article stresses time and time again. Set and setting are slap in the middle of this. IT DEPENDS, as it always does and always did. Some people aren't in the right place to take on a proper meditative practice; others are in it for the wrong reason. Others still are so goal-oriented that they'll never understand the path for what it is. Some will become more selfish. Others will become better people. This is life. This is meditation.
I'm a fan & practitioner of NVC, mindfulness, careful work life balance, etc for being able to treat startups as a marathon vs sprint... But I've observed people overuse & abuse these tools to rationalize prioritizing self over peers in ways that come at the direct expense of the same exact things of their colleagues. It can add up over time in a way that breeds resentment, distrust, non-collaboration, etc. Generally, risks a toxicity that taxes everyone more than the individual brings to the team. What one person needs is different from their peers, so requires some sort of empathic give-and-take, and for someone not as good at paying attention, help doing so.
In a team of high-functioning folks, a tricky line to walk! (And if people have recs here, am curious!)
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadNow when I read this article about mindfulness promoting selfishness what I actually see is people who are preyed upon by these vampires stop being prey when they embrace mindfulness. I suppose when you are the vampire and you are no longer to Leach your happiness from others you would consider that other person selfish. In reality this is more that people embracing mindfulness are incredibly attuned to their surroundings and the people that they interact with and realize what's happening and simply are holding up a mirror. These social vampires like the vampires of fantasy see nothing and thus call other selfish for refusal to be prey.
"Experiments 2a-2c found that induced state mindfulness reduced the willingness to engage in reparative behaviors in normally guilt-inducing situations."
This is about people who has has wronged others becoming less likely to make up for it after practicing mindfulness. Meaning, this is about mindfulness making more vapid social vampires who just take without giving back since it reduces guilt, not about people being more resistant to them.
If we posit instead that the guilt stemmed from a bad faith interaction initiated by a 'vapid social vampire', then correctly rejecting the guilt would be consistent with rejecting said vampires.
Ie. the truth of the grandparent's comment has no bearing on the results of this study (only its interpretation) or vice versa.
Maṇibhadda Sutta (SN 10:4)
On one occasion the Blessed One was staying among the Magadhans at the Jewel-stand Shrine, the haunt of the yakkha-spirit, Maṇibhadda [Auspicious Jewel].
Then Maṇibhadda the yakkha-spirit went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, recited this verse:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily—always. The mindful one grows better each day and is totally freed from animosity.”
The Buddha:
“It’s always auspicious for one who is mindful. The mindful one prospers happily always. The mindful one grows better each day
but isn’t totally freed from animosity. Whoever’s heart, all day, all night, delights in harmlessness with goodwill for all beings
has no animosity with anyone at all.
I studied Buddhism quite a while pretty seriously, and I know that a lot of the meditations involve practicing loving yourself, and your friends, family, community, and that these feelings of love are a core thing to have in your mind as your practice. But you also have to actually do things to help, it's not enough to be nice about it.
The Buddhist temple I took some meditation classes at practiced feeling good things towards people. The Episcopalians next door ran a shelter. It's not hard to see which is further on the path towards enlightenment, and it's something that seems like it's very very often missing from Western teachings.
And completely absent from self-help books about the subject, which are 100% self-centered. Lesson 1 of compassion meditation should be volunteering at a food bank, not learning to forgive yourself for your flaws. These things should be learned together, not in isolation.
What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”.
I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.
I suppose it's fair that in some senses "enlightenment" is orthogonal to "being good" if you use some systems of analysis. By that logic monks sequestered in a monastery are doing something important (?) even if there's little measurable impact of their work on the world around them. I have issues with that logic, I think "to whom" is important and if the answer is "to the person doing it" I'm not sure compassion is really the right adjective anymore.
Of course, translation challenges abound in this area of discussion.
That said, I wouldn't be dismissive about people learning to forgive themselves for their flaws ...
Consider the story of Buddha’s Dog as my go-to story about how Buddhists are definitely saying you need to actually take action to help people in the world for your own self improvement, it's not enough to just feel sad about things and "want to help".
https://theosophywatch.wordpress.com/2019/06/05/tales-of-enl...
If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food,
and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?
Many people in Western culture get into those Eastern (Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist) practices for the purpose of self enhancement. People will meditate to control anxiety, to improve focus or to increase performance in some aspect of their lives. Very often the goal is one of personal improvement, or managing some kind of idealized growth/flourishing of the individual.
Most people here would probably deride the outlandish New Age ideas that grew out of the original Christian Science underpinnings of New Thought. But I find the basic premises of new thought to be the spiritual zeitgeist of the current age.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought
Mindfulness practice at its core is super simple, there's not much to talk about, but it's been completely associated with the self-help movement to the point that most people can't distinguish it from nonsense.
Zen comes to America and it's adopted by self-absorbed people as a reason to be more like the self-absorbed people they want to be.
The advantaged of a well-thought out dogma is it can include things like a focus on compassion so that a tool doesn't just become another tool to help people rationalize their worst tendencies.
There are, of course, problems with dogmas, but I do encourage people to seek out things that challenge themselves rather than confirm their opinions and behavior.
I spent a few months doing more, and it may not be related, but I became increasingly detached from the outside world, more self-absorbed and less motivated. Spent a lot of time just sitting and being content with nothing, which made me question why I should strive for -anything-. Always focused on improving myself, and the way I thought and felt, but it kept me stuck in my own head and not engaged with other people. There is a benefit in doing loving kindness and other forms of meditation that connect you with others.
I Meditated, Now I Don't Care Anymore - https://youtu.be/NnTLJtBr1zo
- Alan Watts
The distinction between self and other is simply a concept. Certainly useful in many situations, but ultimately just one perspective - one tool at the mind’s disposal.
One could reasonably argue this is the central teaching of Buddhism. Alan Watts helped articulate these ideas to western audiences in many of his lectures:
“You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things that happen to us rather than things that we do. In other words, we don’t assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape.
If you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware, also—in the same moment and at the same time—that you’re not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun.”
I would say the "routine" aspect of these has been so much more impactful than any of the actual individual things that I'm doing. I'm sure 10 mins of yoga/meditation is better than doing 0 but it's nothing life changing. One of the issues with ADHD-like symptoms for me was inconsistency. Having a morning routine sets up consistency and a system within which I know exactly what I need to do to "succeed" for the day.
Reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear helped me actually turn these things into habits.
EDIT
Also consider the progressive muscle relaxation meditation technique. It greatly helps with anxiety and I still benefit from it today even though I did only for a few months about 4 years ago. I can recognize when I am tensing up due to anxiety and immediately relax myself.
Breath mindfulness can sharpen your blade, but it won't tell you when or why to use your blade. I present Axelrod as a modern pop culture representation of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapanasati
In all seriousness, people who know what they want tend to come across as selfish. I don’t know why people consider this bad. All airlines tell you to put on your masks, before helping others (in their emergency videos). The idea being, you must be capable in order to help others.
I think this is something many altruists miss. Society is best when everyone is healthy and capable. Teach a man to fish, as opposed to giving him a fish, so to speak.
- badly paraphrased from Gary John Bishop
"Selfish" is a sloppy word that combines unlike things. Which means it's a toxic word.
People should be self-interested. We are organisms, after all. Like animals.
However, people should not be fixated on their own self-interest to the point that they neglect the bigger picture. If you neglect the bigger picture, you will not be successful at being self-interested.
For example, if you neglect your spouse's feelings, people will say you're being "selfish." But you aren't being self-interested, because you aren't promoting a good life for yourself.
For a good critique of altruism, which is really a separate topic, see Ayn Rand.
Ten years ago, telling a distressed friend you don't feel like hearing about their problems would be incredibly rude. Now you can find NYT articles explaining how to couch the same sentiment in more acceptable terms like, "I don't have the bandwidth to perform that kind of emotional labor right now."
Same thing here. Telling a person you wronged to "get over it" is unacceptable. Telling them that you've been working on letting go of negative feelings about the past and being more mindful of the present, and you hope they can do the same? Well if anyone has a problem with that, you don't need that kind of energy in your life!
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
Imagine if everyone had that response... I know it's fantasy, but I think that if you're studying mindfulness and compassion that's at least the direction you might want to be heading.
See https://douglastoft.com/2022/04/18/robert-pirsig-on-coming-t...
Very few people are equipped to handle crazy people on the street, even among people who are trying to become better people, whatever that may mean to them.
You yourself attended the seminar on "loving-kindness" but couldn't resist dunking on these people some time later. But the thing is that I don't consider that inconsistent just because you were trying to improve yourself.
Even if the seminar were about helping crazy people that were standing in front of self-help seminars, it's still an unfair standard.
More generally, Buddhist medicine would be a good thing, as Ghandi might have put it. The heart of Buddhist medicine is that life is short, suffering is unavoidable, and that the best treatment is to teach and practice Buddhism.
Something like this occurred at my buddhist temple during a meditation, except it was one of the members who collapsed. Someone went over help and the rest of us... couldn't do anything more. An ambulance was called. they got medical treatment.
Should we have collectively wrung our hands? To what end?
The point here isn't averting your eyes in the face of suffering, it's about correctly judging the situation and taking only effective action. Collectively performing impotent empathy isn't any more useful to the ailing person than quietly sitting and sending them prayers/lovingkindness/whatever.
And to be clear, I mean this as an example and a warning to not get too disconnected from the physical world while doing these meditations. They were all as friendly of people as any others I met in a city, it was the context that made it stick out in my mind.
In my entire life, meeting people from all walks of life (including people I vehemently disagree with, and some I would almost consider enemies, and even some zen Buddhists), when it came to the crunch, I know they/we would all have run towards an emergency as humans/neighbours.
On the other hand, let me assume it's true, then it isn't representative IME.
The homeless in places like SF are routinely experiencing serious emergencies, invariably need money and shelter, and are passed by tens of thousands of people each day who have the abilities to help them.
Of those tens of thousands of people who pass a homeless person who's clearly in need of help, perhaps 100 will give them some money, perhaps 5 will pause to ask if they can help, and perhaps 1 will actually take a not-insignificant amount of time to try and assist them.
These numbers are certainly not perfectly accurate, but from the people-watching I've done in the bay area, I can easily and confidently say that the average response to a stranger who has the class-signifiers of being homeless, even if that person appears to be having a seizure or other crisis, is to ignore them entirely.
I think my observations align closely with the parent comment's observation, and I absolutely believe it is representative of the people who go to meditation courses in the bay area.
The rest: conflation.
Conflation with what?
The major issue raised here (mindfulness and selfishness in general, etc) with SF homelessness and peoples response to it.
Draw what lessons you will, or tell me that I'm making it up wholesale if you seriously think it's implausible if you feel the need. All I can say is that it happened and stood out as particularly strange to me. I didn't take cell phone video to prove it six years later to a stranger on the internet, I just wanted to know who to contact for help in an unfamiliar neighborhood and city.
What I took from the situation was that if you're going to seriously practice compassion in meditation it needs to also be coupled with action or else you end up getting disconnected and numb to the world around you. I don't blame anyone for their responses, and definitely don't judge them as bad people or anything. We're all human and the best of us are open-minded enough to our failings to improve.
I'm saying that if you're going to practice "feeling compassion" you should also practice acting on it. Otherwise when you need to act you will freeze. Acting on compassion is a reflex, a habit, a muscle that needs development as much as the ability to accept that you aren't perfect.
that incident was imprinted in you, but how has it worked out for you since?
my guess: you failed to learn anything because of course that focused seminar doesn't teach anything related to the kind of mental health emergencies that occur on San Francisco streets, and so thats a decent crutch for you to lean on to not engage with them yourself, overriden by your own self preservation instincts. or are you now a mental health case worker that responds to these instead of the police? or do you know how to call those groups now so that you aren't the confused bystander like when you first moved?
My point was that the context of a class on loving-kindness was especially jarring. I fully advocate for everyone to take a class on basic first aid and know who to contact in response to a few basic classes of emergency, that seems as basic as having clean water in your house in case of an earthquake.
I can perform CPR, stop blood loss within reason, or call someone that knows how to do things I don't. I'm very happy to take suggestions for other skills that should be commonly known to be good community members.
https://sfgov.org/dosw/mental-health-services
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ccyfo9RBcSJ/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M...
Assuming it's some stereotype about new age self-defined gurus, no, these were perfectly regular and generally friendly people. The situation was extremely odd, which is why I remember it.
Someone else suggested it might be because the state of mind in that situation was wrong for the task at hand. I think it's probably correct, in another context they would have taken immediate action to help but were in an unfamiliar role.
A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contrast, the stress-reduction instructors were a wreck.
A friend and I used to go out to eat on a regular basis. He reasonably decided to change his diet to more healthy foods. For all I know, it did improve his health, but I did observe that at a ball game, he opted for a hamburger and then his body rebelled. He had lost the ability to eat commonplace foods.
Among meditators (of which I was one), I observed a heighten sensitivity to being knocked off kilter by anything or anyone that conflicted with the world view of the practitioner.
My friends who were into body building routinely lifted weights for many hours a week, but when suitcases or scuba tanks need to be carried, there a was strong aversion. I surmised that the unbalanced loads greatly threw-off how they had trained themselves to lift weights with good form.
Among Python programmers who use Black and isort in order to improve the appearance of code, it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable. Likewise, it is common to become highly judgmental of people who don't use that tooling (and even more so with type annotations where proponents seem to have an almost religious fervor).
I don't really know what conclusion to draw from these events, but there is something of interest going on.
I would totally believe that it was more an unpracticed response while in a relaxed and learning state of mind than anyone's actual underlying meanness, these were nice folks as far as I could tell otherwise. That one situation was just astoundingly weird.
And indeed, it wasn't a person in the class that responded, it was an assistant who had done the material many times. The teacher didn't seem to know what to do either, I think it may be as you say that the assistant just happened to be in a "run the stuff" state of mind rather than a "teach" or "listen/contemplate" state of mind.
That definitely would explain a lot, a mental context switch takes a significant amount of time and meditation absolutely can do that. It would also explain why I felt like a bit of an alien bringing it to anyone's attention, I had arrived ten minutes late from another activity so I wasn't "in the zone" yet.
At least, I've yet to hear a better explanation. I've attributed it to long ingrained habits showing up in class because in no other location with the same group (edit: not the same people, the same organization) did I encounter something similar. But that can certainly be coincidence.
I did point this disconnect out to the class, and I think any Buddhist would not take awareness of this response as a criticism rather than an observation and opportunity to improve. If any of us were perfect there'd be no need for a class in the first place.
Before this tooling, my experience is that people are less tolerant of whatever isn't they prefer. If familiarity breeds readability, why not adopt a standard?
I also assume your characterisation is sensationalised to fit the comparison: all valid python is readable, but some can be read faster, and more importantly - errors are easier to spot, if its in a familiar format.
wrt the lifting scenario, I'd have to ask what "strong aversion" means; presumably good form is intended for situations that you repetitively lift weights, where long-term unbalanced lifting would cause damage. If that's not the case, maybe we should all lift with good form?
Since then I have realized I think very few people actually care about strangers beyond conspicuously appearing to for selfish reasons.
That's the advice I keep seeing.
Funny how nobody addresses the main point, only that my 1-sentence executive summary is not accurate :-)
Main point is: if you start doing mindfulness exercises, you will eventually get into insight territory, and without a cushion of compassion this can mess you up.
Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.
I don't even know if enlightening exist, to be honest.
For me, it doesn't matter. I don't need the promise of something potentially amazing in the future, I'm just interested in something that makes my life better right now.
In the center, I only met regular people with ordinary problems, even teachers. Getting a hang on suffering, one step at a time. Sometimes being completly off the mark, because humans are humans.
Meditation is also probably the most boring thing I ever encountered. It's unspectacular, tedious, slow and utterly mundane.
But it's the only thing that I've tried that brings consistent, increasing benefits in life.
I wish for everybody to find something that is as good for them, awakening or not.
I don't know what meditation you are practicing, and there are so many of them I wouldn't be able to give any advice that would work with your own practice.
So I can't know if you are doing something wrong.
What I know, however, is that in the Vipassana meditation following Sayagyi U Ba Khin tradition, one would advice to focus on practice. There is no expectation. Nothing to achieve.
In this tradition, your role is to provide efforts, but one is not responsible for the result. Things are just rising and passing away. Suffering. Bliss. Anything else. Just appearing and disapearing.
Meditation is just the tool to help us live through that.
Peace is not bliss. Peace means you don't need bliss, nor are you hindered by suffering. Easier said than done, and that's why it's a long path.
It's a lifetime practice. You start again every day. One day, you realize you feel a bit more peaceful and happy than you used to. You smile. And you sit once again.
If you have any interest in accessing a higher state of consciousness (or more accurately a flatter state of consciousness), it's an interesting hobby to pursue, kinda like being good at mental math.
The western adaptation is reducing meditation and mindfulness to a "tool" of relieving stress and better ones mental well-being. As easy as downloading an app and stay calm for few minutes.
Unfortunately, this is not ideal. The traditional way is to seek a guru who asks the disciple to cleanse their heart first. Put them on the spiritual path of purifying the soul. Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey. Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Fortunately, for those who want to live in a society closely, they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane by helping others and following ones duty with high-integrity.
However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives. There are so many apps helping with the patterns of different breathing techniques.
But don't expect you or anyone to become a better person just by doing some mindfulness exercises. When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core, you will just highlight whats inside you more. I.e. if you are bad, you will get worse. Mindfulness has nothing to do with it but just amplifying what is already there as you discover yourself more through mindfulness.
These kinds of topics are unfortunately what the focus many will remain at.
generally speaking -- rolex collections don't spring up from practical reasons -- and he's known to purposely use cheap watch bands and flip the watch faces towards his wrists in an effort to hide them from view..
https://www.watchmaster.com/en/journal/stories-en/personalit...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-wOoXijqZE
Have you ever asked your wife about this?
lots of rich religious folks out there in history. when they expropriated the buddhists in the huichang expropriation during the tang, they took tens of millions of acres of arable land and liberated 150,000 temple slaves
Do you happen to have any good links for learning more about this?
The Wikipedia page[0] is a mess and my Google skills have fallen short.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huichang_Persecution_of_Buddhi...
I think it's the foreign aspect, but also another one is that when you have limited experience of what a casual Christian (or Buddhist) is like, it creates a falsely positive impression. Many of the Christians people in this country would be familiar with are a mixture of missionaries and people who came and did things like set up schools and hospitals for people at little to no cost. And, vice versa, Buddhists Americans are generally familiar with are going to be those genuinely interested in the pursuit for its own sake, rather than driven to such out of cultural inertia.
By contrast here you get daily news about things such as monks being busted running illegal gambling dens, and sometimes the rather more perverse. And there's also a culture associating various Buddhist icons with good luck which trends towards a complete bastardization and mockery of it as people try to literally use such for good luck. Think of something like the equivalent of a poker player praying to God 'Just one time, Jesus' while rubbing a crucifix. The various Buddhist "rituals" for good results during finals are well, not something that's going to exactly exemplify the moral pursuits of Buddhism.
Seeing people express something along the lines of the myth of the noble savage, when you're that savage and certainly not noble is quite interesting, and jading!
> The traditional way is to seek a guru
"The" way? According to whom? Did you do it?
> Some even leave everything and go to forest or mountains to practice for years.
Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...
> they should practice "Raja Yoga" which is also a spiritual path where one raises their spiritual plane
Again, according to who? Why not Jesus? Or Scientology? What's your personal experience?
> However simple breathing exercises still work for the body and can be easily incorporated into every day lives.
Well this is out of nowhere. It doesn't connect to anything that's been said. Do you do this?
> When one goes to discover/amplify their inner core
Inner core is new. What's that and who asked? Is it the same as a True Self?
I'd say let's just focus on this: "Meditation is a part of ones spiritual journey." That's correct and all this issue needs. MBSR and the other sanitized, faith-cleansed scientifically quantifiable practices are not synonymous with mindfulness, meditation, or Buddhism. They're tangential, and for some they are nice greeters at the door to a path of spirituality.
Swami Vivekananda has a dedicated book on "Raja Yoga" in detail.
I recommend - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abdula.pra... app. I am a subscriber for years and this one has the authentic breathing patterns.
I'm sorry, what?
> Except the Buddha and his stories explicitly advised against asceticism...
Yup, the Middle Path.
Stop wasting your time on Church and find better alternatives from the east.
Over the years of living there I became even more intolerant with these people, I came from the Biodynamic Ag side of things so was pretty battle-hardened in the World of 'Becasue woo' to explain most things.
But, Boulder broke me... I realized that most in the US who heard about Steiner's work (I think most of it is BS from a conman) were treading the woke spectrum, affluent or not, but Boulder'ites were simply faking the most ostentatious facade: they would drive their Tesla to and from their mansions yet remain the most rude, stingiest, greedy people I have ever encountered--I'm from SoCal and I'm used to fake and rich people, but even I was stunned by the sheer numbers in just one relatively small town!
But because they practiced 'mindfulness' and had a pocket full of crystals and a yoga mat in tow they were somehow exempt from it all.
The worst were the mindful vegans and vegetarians, I did the most strictest form of renewable and regenerative forms of Ag, and had cooked mainly in historic towns with a long history of farm to table concepts--dating back 100s of years in the case of Italy.
But the absolute trite that left their mouth was stunning, I was incapable of speaking my mind as they were our clientele, but... the way these people speak with such authority about topics hey have no idea about is astonishing: most were professors from CU Boulder reminding you they have a post-doc BA in some unrelated topic, but they all have more in-depth knowledge about the intricacies of Human physiology than people who actually studied health sciences (I have a BSc in Cellular and Molecular Biology, became a Master Grower in Biodynamic Horticulture, and cooked/ran Farm to table concept kitchens and helped grow 75%+ of everything that was on my menu).
Personally speaking, my recent trip will likely be my last: the vapid and rich were always the shot-callers there, but it's with great sorrow that I admit just how shallow that place really is. All of the progress many of us dedicated a lot of our time and effort was undone in less than 3 years!
If they're from Boulder, it's just real-estate money; it wasn't anything based on merit, they just got in early.
> It's a beautiful, clean, crime free city and I hated it.
That is simply not the case, in fact this is one of the worst offending police states I have ever had the misfortune of having lived in. You want to see what makes people think Boulder is crime free, look at this case that had to be taken to the Supreme Court [0], because local courts allowed for the systematic abuse and torture of a woman who was supposed to be fined on Pearl Street Mall for just smoking.
It also is old and dirty place, I lived in an apartment that had to have all the asbestos removed in 2019! The town when left to it's own devices, as in devoid of it's massive underclass that keep it functional, descends into utter chaos: see CU Boulder riots in 2020.
It has a disgusting underbelly based fiefdom that is owned by Tebo and 5 families that all collude with each other; I used to feel bad for the people who tried to make a life their... but now I think they deserve what they get which is an over-priced, over-hyped Police State that has been over-populated to such an extent that it's nothing like when I first came and decided to move their (in my case 2007). Which is typical of most tech hubs.
This isn't nostalgia, so much it is a 'going clear,' I'm glad I got to live it in it's tech hey-day 2015-2020 as a founder, and still be able to live to tell about it (I used to go to the King Soopers on Table Mesa where that shooting took place) because from what I've seen COVID really left it's mark in a way that makes me ok with never going back.
I caught a guy trying to steal my catalytic convertor in April and ended up giving him the $10 I had in my pocket: the guy couldn't get food or a place to stay in town as it was over-filled with no where to go.
My friends still struggle to pay for rent on old over-valued apartment buildings to slumlords etc...
This is a town wherein it's 'legacy families' and Tebo own so much vacant land that they could have setup camps and shelters with minimal investment just to keep Pearl Street Mall from looking like a refugee camp and keep business going but did nothing instead. And this is the type of 'pride' this town has.
That Kool-aid is strong.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgbqOVtaDuk
Practicing mindfulness is not just letting your mind wander. It’s practice, just like exercising or coding. You get better at it with time, not just a Homer Simpson moment of following your thoughts after being asked a question about being a decent human being.
The whole idea of mindfulness is to get to know yourself better and work on the not so great parts such as when your ego gets involved. If you practice it today and have found tremendous results, great! Also if you tried it and it didn’t help much, that’s okay too.
I’ll continue to do it because it’s what I believe separates good from great in my life and helps me accomplish more. I’m glad they mentioned this:
> “The effects are much weaker than had been proposed.” Like Hafenbrack, he suspects the practice can still be useful – but whether you see the desired benefits may depend on many factors, including the meditators’ personality, motivation and beliefs, he says. “Context is really important.”
You know what he’ll bring up every day? Mindfulness or meditation or stoicism. Like buddy, if you can’t sleep it’s probably because you know you’re not a nice person deep down. No amount of meditation is gonna help that.
Hadn't heard of him, but as an [ex]scientist I'd be fascinated to see the actual data showing any correlation between "narcissist" and "entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru"[0]
Put slightly different, how many people who shy away from attention end up famous for their podcasts?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss
Both supply and demand for these motivational charlatans are immense. Something tells me it's not about actual drive to be successful, because the most successful people aren't listening/reading that crap, they're too busy practicing, learning, etc. Instead I think it's a self-misdiagnosis (there's something wrong with me, and it's my motivation) and then the charlatans confirm that by saying "yes, listen to me, I'll give you a short high of confidence, come back for more!".
In reality the success addicts just aren't passionate about anything, and that's ok. What they need is to either (a) find their passion, and that takes time, an open mind, and trying different things or (b) accept that they aren't passionate and enjoy life in other ways.
I mean, it's not that he doesn't engage in philanthropy, because he does[0]. It's that he doesn't talk about philanthropy?
Is it possible--and I offer this in the spirit of friendship (mostly)--that you need to take your head out of your own ass for a minute?
[0] https://twitter.com/tferriss/status/1502103847728300070
Importantly, I didn’t use the word philanthropy because it’s clearly not the only or even a good way of helping people. It doesn’t even have to be strangers heck. The only time he and his guests discuss “not them” is when they could learn or extract something from said others.
Why don’t people generally call someone making $40K donation $10K philanthropy? It’s just charity. However Tim Ferris does some tepid Ukraine stuff and it’s philanthropy.
Good example: Tim Pool. He's ideologically pretty close to me, but I can't stand him as a person. No thanks.
Not exactly a mark of great compassion or kindness, if that's actually what's presented.
We all profit off other people's work, and are profited off of. I personally don't find this inherently problematic, since it's not a zero sum game.
To reiterate my point: I think it's not per se unkind to profit off other people's work. It's all about _how_ it's done.
Collecting most of the income from a project while putting very little effort into it feels kind of skeezy to me, but I'm not sure I can tell you precisely what bothers me about that. There may not be any actual problems with it.
Yeah, that's... icky.
Thanks for explaining.
(I know it's bad posting something this dismissive in deeply nested comments, but I believe it is relevant information to the discussion which hasn't been mentioned elsewhere. I tried elaborating but the elaborated versions of this comment were more cynical/uncharitable, not less, so I'm keeping it short instead).
In that case, you might want to listen to the episode with Will MacAskill (of effective altruism fame):
https://tim.blog/2015/11/22/will-macaskill/
Many other guests who seem to be genuinely kind people come to mind as well (e.g., Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Debbie Millman) but it probably doesn't get any more obvious than with Will MacAskill that this show isn't about selfish or narcissistic endeavours.
It’s a common strategy for podcasters/big personalities and defenses of them to have examples of engaging with another side. Even those examples are few and far between compared to the norm. IE Joe Rogan or Lex Friedman having far more right wing or right wing sympathetic people than left wing people on their shows. That doesn’t mean anything bad in and of itself. The issue is acting like having at least one person from each side means the show and/or host are balanced unbiased people in this regard.
As much as one example to the contrary might not automatically change a general sentiment or perception, one particular listener only having encountered what they perceive as narcissism or self-involved navel-gazing might just be down to sampling bias.
The point I was trying to make is that there clearly are examples from that particular podcast where guests at least aren't entirely motivated by selfish or narcissistic pursuits.
When he could land great podcast guests or interview subjects and let them speak it turned out great.
When he brought on certain friends or acquaintances and they tried to discuss something together with Tim’s input playing a large role, it was anywhere from boring to a disappointing mess. I haven’t listened to his podcast for years after he had a string of pseudoscience guests pushing easily debunked ideas. I vividly remember one where Tim was clearly uneasy with the obvious nonsense his guest was pushing but he wouldn’t dare push back or question anything for any reason. Really disappointing.
Tim Ferriss has always been like that, though. His whole personal brand was built on the idea that he interviewed world-class experts and delivered their knowledge to you. His old blog was almost exclusively “guest posts” which is another way of saying he got other people to write the blog for him (brilliant marketing move).
I once met a mindfulness coach who was trying to sell me on his business where he comes onsite and coaches corporate clients on mindfulness. The pitch broke down when he couldn’t articulate to me what the hell was really meant by mindfulness.
There's no point in trying to teach mindfulness to people who just want a 5-minute de-stressing session. Mindfulness is work.
At the same time, I became very distressed about being single and having very few friends.
I finally realized why I lacked friends and relationships, it was because I pushing people away. I also realized that the reason for this was because I was stuck inside my head, over analyzing everything, over thinking everything, making up problems in my head, being anxious, worried, and fearful about the past and the future.
So I found "mindfulness" as a way to escape my brain from the never ending loop of analyzing people and social situations, to stop trying to figure out people's hidden intentions, stop thinking about the past and the future. To live in the moment and let myself be me rather than hiding myself.
To me, mindfulness just means recognizing when my brain is a run-away train of thoughts and to not let it consume me. It's about getting outside of my head and into real life. For me, it's the difference of being safe but miserable or taking risks and potentially reaping rewards (friendships, relationships, new opportunities, etc.) The best way I can describe is the stereotypical/incorrect description of being an introvert vs being an extrovert.
- self-awareness, ie aware of your thoughts and feelings
- being present in the moment
- emotional regulation
I always use security guards as my example: you need to see what is actually there, not what you expect to be; you need to be aware of your own response, eg not panic or become angry; and you need to both be able to calm yourself and overcome your default not to act, as appropriate.
Here is how it feels: the brain experiences stuff "objectively".
For example: if something happens and you get angry, instead of fully being angry, you get to see that you are angry. And now you get the choice to be angry or not. Or sometimes you don't get a choice, but can clearly see it and realize that it's something you have to go through. There emerges a clear separation between your brain, your emotions and the core you.
It's not something you do consciously, it's something that your brain does by itself all the time. Like fish noticing water. Things don't really change, but you get a perception to notice and see things.
An analogy I like to use is: You are playing a 2d game. Your character exists in a 2d world. But your perspective is 3d and can clearly see what's happening.
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P.S.
Since you seem to be curious, keep in mind that meditation is serious stuff and needs to be given respect. Using meditation for just feeling good is like using a gun to dig a hole. Can you do it? yeah. But without gun discipline, you may end up shooting yourself in the foot.
Meditation is a tool. It exists safely only within a larger ecosystem of other things. Prescribing meditation openly without the ecosystem is dangerous.
Once mindfulness comes, the problems get more and more subtle.
On the one hand, if they've bought into the notion that "we are all a family here" and that loyalty to their employer is like a familial obligation, and quitting their job is like abandoning an elderly relative on the street corner, then they may indeed be consumed by feelings of guilt and anxiety. Most observers would note that this is a false equivalency: the relationship between employer and employee is certainly not like that between parent and child.
One could likewise argue that quitting a job one hates is actually altruistic, as there are people who might like that job and if one's workplace is full of people who like what they're doing, it makes it a much more pleasant environment. Additionally, people who hate their jobs are known to take out their frustrations on family members, which is an unpleasant situation, so quitting a job one hates, even if it results in a somewhat lower standard of living, is not at all selfish - assuming one can find another job, and the end result is not poverty/homelessness.
Meditation would seem to be beneficial in any case. Some people don't even recognize that they hate their job as much as they do, and perhaps some internal reflection can suggest some changes that can be made to make the situation at least tolerable.
Incidentally, attempting to use things like guilt to motivate people to be obedient is a very unhealthy and Machiavellian tactic, and if 'mindfulness' helps people to break out of such situations, then the more the better.
> The practice had muted their feelings of guilt and, as a result, their willingness to make amends
Personally, I would say a sincere apology would be motivated by a person's objective belief that they had done wrong, not by their desire to soothe their feelings of guilt. But the whole situation seems of dubious value, as the person is being requested to write an apology (vs. offering one of their own motivation), and to a person they feel most guilty towards. In other words, this study seems pre-constructed (intentionally or not) to produce these results...
Meditation is not about meditation. It's not about your time that you're on the cushion. Any good teacher points this out again and again. Meditation is about life, it's about Metta, it's about understanding your place in the world. It isn't about progress, or happiness, or being calm. It isn't a fad, to be dropped for something different when that becomes the next popular thing on Instagram. It's deeper than that, more central, more vibrant, longer, simpler - but harder! This is a journey of a lifetime, not a happy pill.
The whole context is stacked full of nuance - which, to be fair, the article stresses time and time again. Set and setting are slap in the middle of this. IT DEPENDS, as it always does and always did. Some people aren't in the right place to take on a proper meditative practice; others are in it for the wrong reason. Others still are so goal-oriented that they'll never understand the path for what it is. Some will become more selfish. Others will become better people. This is life. This is meditation.
I'm a fan & practitioner of NVC, mindfulness, careful work life balance, etc for being able to treat startups as a marathon vs sprint... But I've observed people overuse & abuse these tools to rationalize prioritizing self over peers in ways that come at the direct expense of the same exact things of their colleagues. It can add up over time in a way that breeds resentment, distrust, non-collaboration, etc. Generally, risks a toxicity that taxes everyone more than the individual brings to the team. What one person needs is different from their peers, so requires some sort of empathic give-and-take, and for someone not as good at paying attention, help doing so.
In a team of high-functioning folks, a tricky line to walk! (And if people have recs here, am curious!)
"higher vibrations only"