This is a forefront issue that Buddhism tries to address, both modern pragmatic Buddhism and fundamentalist Buddhism. It's why right speech, right action, and morals is one of the first things they drill into you. Most pragmatic practitioners will refuse to teach you if you indicate that you have some mental problems or moral deficiencies that should be addressed by a professional first, as mindfulness may end up doing more harm than good. It's one of the flaws of teaching secular mindfulness, far from its Buddhist roots. I've experienced all these interpersonal deficits after meditating seriously 2 hours every day for 2 years straight. Just need to have the self-awareness to address them, despite the goal of no-self.
I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".
There's a balance to be struck with anything. On the one hand, teaching meditation outside of the context of religion might increase the likelihood of the purpose of the practice being misunderstood. On the other hand, any religious practice runs the risk of breeding a sense of self righteousness in the practitioner. With meditation and mindfulness, I've seen both.
Also, I gotta say that language like "moral deficiencies" sounds incredibly broad without some examples. I think that speaks to the drawbacks of a religious context. I don't necessarily mean to direct these comments at you in particular (after all, I don't know what you meant by "moral deficiencies" without more info), but morality is a slippery topic and religion often seems to treat it like it isn't.
Forgive me, English is not my first language so at times I struggle finding the right word for it.
The pali word is "sila", the closest translation is morals. To be deficient in sila is to be deficient in morals, was my thought process. One example is do no harm, or avoid lying. If all your daily life is filled with causing harm, and deceit, then it will be filled with chaos and end up making it harder for you to make progress in awakening or do good stuff. This is one interpretation of karma (cause and effect).
There's a whole other philosophical side to it that I think about, outside of the Buddhist context. That certain choices or circumstances in life end up reducing your moral agency in this world. People can be born under unsafe, and unkind environments, so sometimes it becomes harder to be generous and kind, as if there was less wiggle room in your ability to act as a moral agent. One of the things Buddhism tries to address is removing the layers of conditioning in your mind and concept of self, to give you more freedom.
It's interesting that Western Christianity has pretty much the same underlying message - you simply can't reach salvation and union with God without starting from right morals. (This might be why Stoicism with its meditative and contemplative traditions, and a similar focus on divinely-inspired "right/moral action" was a key ally of early Christianity.) Islam of course has its own Sufi traditions, the Biblical prophets are said to wander in the desert etc. etc.
> you simply can't reach salvation and union with God without starting from right morals.
This is almost the opposite of Christianity, depending on what you mean by "right morals".
Christianity says you simply can't reach salvation and be with God unless you are flawless, which is humanly impossible, so unless God does something... hence Christ.
I still meditate daily, but more in a maintenance manner, the same way a power lifter goes to the gym out of habit, for health, without the goal of setting new PRs. Most of the time, my mind meditates itself automatically.
I am very good at deep work, and concentrating on stuff. It is also easy to deal with stress and emotions in my day to day. My life feels like playing a third person video game with the FOV slider turned to 360 degrees. Every sensation comes discretely where I can see the beginning and end. 1 second is a really long time, enough room to fit 1000s of sensations, bounded only by your speed of perception. I am aware of how my mind constructs the concept of time, the idea of later. The cool part about hitting stages of enlightenment is that there is a quantum shift in how your brain processes, that I know I cannot regress to a previous stage. But I wonder if awakening is built from physical, neural correlates, then things like dementia or a traumatic brain injury might reverse some of the effects.
Another interesting note is that I have a much higher pain tolerance, as well as sort of better control of my body movements. I know some people describe enlightenment as a full body transformation, not just the mind.
One thing that is keeping me from progressing further is the inconvenience that comes with sleep alterations caused by meditation, and how it affects my work as a programmer. I still have obligations to participate in modern society, pay bills, keep relationships, etc. And I know if I didn't do this, I would be perfectly content doing nothing all day, just meditating. It's why retreats and the monastic life is so conductive to awakening. Maybe this is the ultimate FIRE goal, I'm just working on the FI :)
For the record, the Buddha has never advocated leaving society, especially lay followers. Whether we are a monk, at a retreat, in a family, we all have a duty to be a wise citizen.
"Do you still meditate? What does it offer you? Has it offered you what you expected?"
I'm not the OP, but after I practiced meditation intensely for a few months I found two huge benefits:
First: before I meditated I used to get annoyed and bored when I had to do chores like washing the dishes or standing in line. But after meditating for a while, when I had to do such a chore I'd just focus on my breath and I'd no longer feel bored or annoyed. In fact, such chores and waiting in line became almost pleasurable because they gave me an opportunity to meditate.
Second: when someone said something mean to me I would just focus on my breath and sort of catch myself about to get angry and saw that I had a choice whether to get angry or not. I didn't have to get drawn in to the hurricane of feelings as an unconscious reaction to the meanness directed at me. Instead I could just continue to focus on my breath and I wouldn't get angry at all.
Unfortunately, for some reason that I no longer remember, I fell off the wagon of meditating regularly and went back to my old easily bored, quick to anger self. I still try to meditate occasionally by focusing on my breath, but it doesn't help nearly as much as when I meditated regularly for hours at a time.
I'm also curious about an answer. If I may take a guess from my own experience. People from Western countries tend to start meditation practice with a specific goal in mind as opposed to just doing it naturally as it is part of the culture. For me a goal is gaining mental strength and balance. After meditating for a while I reach that goal (at least to some extent) and get overwhelmed by the energetic surplus. That leads to either distraction or simply investing this positivity into another goal (work, a project, social activities, ...) leaving me less motivated to further meditate (because it is less "fun" to sit still and work on your mind instead of doing something). After a while the energetic surplus is consumed and I am sooner or later mentally back to square one - because stopping the meditation also stopped the healing and reflection and I'm faced anew with old wounds destabilizing my mind.
Thanks! This guy is great! But I have to admit that he looks like one of the elders from Logan’s Run… or most any other 1970s sci-fi TV show. Of course that does not detract from god message. I just got a laugh from it.
Mindfulness/meditation are tools to attain a level of awareness so that one can recognize what are the things holding one back from experiencing supreme peace and bliss. Without working on virtues like compassion, kindness, truthfulness, humility etc. these tools will only aggrevate one's selfish nature.
There are countless examples from ancient India where advanced meditators obtained divine boons due to their severe penance (by meditation on the divine), but ended up using the boon for expansion of their power/wealth at the cost of others, thereby becoming extremely selfish and a problem for the society to sustain properly.
Forefront? HA! My experience is diametrically opposite: prolong Buddhism practice often leads to ego-centric behaviors that are swept under the rug and not talked about.
I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.
Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.
Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).
Buddhist vipassana meditation is based on deconstructing the ego altogether as well as all desires, and recognizing the illusion behind them. So if people are being egocentric, they probably have not progressed very far in their spiritual path.
Are you sure that right things and morals have anything to do with Buddhism or meditation? For "serious meditators" - seriousness is one of the first things one drops when practices start working.
Serious in the sense that, "I'm going to put some effort to investigate what is going on, seek out teachers and resources, and apply my knowledge through daily practice". The actual meditation itself is very playful but focused, like getting good at a competitive video game.
> The five spiritual faculties are said to be like a cart with four wheels and a driver. If any of the four wheels is too small, wobbly, or not in balance with the others, then the going on the spiritual road will be rough. The four wheels symbolize faith, wisdom, energy, and concentration. If the driver is not paying attention there will also be problems. The driver symbolizes mindfulness. [See SN 48.18, also Visuddhimagga, IV, 45.2.]
> The five spiritual faculties have also been presented in another order that can be useful: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. In this order, they apply to each of the three trainings, the first of which, as discussed earlier, is morality. We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living. We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life. Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on.
Alice says a blunt remark that hurts Bob's feeling (unintentional wrongful speech). Bob lets Alice know that he is hurt. The average person would feel guilt/distress and apologize. Instead, Alice is equipped with attainments from meditation. Alice sees the arising of these negative emotions, non-identifies with them, and goes about her life. Bob rightfully sees this as egocentric behavior. The Eightfold Path tries to address this through Right Speech.
I've also seen it make some people more likely to fall into the trap of woo-science and dodgy, spiritual scams. The practice of awakening forces you to investigate the ways you suffer. Before, they may throw their money at these sketchy MLMs and still suffer. With meditation, they can throw their money at them and also suffer a lot less.
The term is "spiritual bypass". You disconnect from emotions, pleasure and pain, etc, see the world as illusion, and no longer feel guilt for poor action.
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!
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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've seen a similar effect in a subset of people that get super into psychedelics. In some cases, they seem to lead to a hyper inflated ego.
> Yet a growing body of research suggests that such stories may be surprisingly common, with one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.
(And going back to psychedelics -- I have a similar complaint about people's attitudes around "bad trips". Psychonauts like to say "there's no such thing as a bad trip, only difficult ones", but I think that dangerously discounts how destabilizing trips can be sometimes.)
I've been reading Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and the author makes the same point about informed consent. It's widely known in various traditions meditation can mess you up. I think he quotes someone saying "better not to start if you're not going to finish" or you may end up in a bad place for a long time.
> It's widely known in various traditions meditation can mess you up
Yeah, and the interesting thing is that in many Eastern traditions, meditation wasn't ever even recommended for the average person. And those that did do it, did so in an environment with teachers and safeguards. The McMindfulness fad is missing almost all of that, and I'm starting to see more and more stories of people hitting a dangerous wall without the cultural support they need to navigate to the other side.
Sam Harris is one of the current major proponents of meditation in the West, and I've heard him say "even if meditation were bad for people, I would still recommend they do it". I think that's irresponsible advice.
Mindfulness the same as wealth, beauty or general success can also be a tool to elevate yourself above others. Especially if your self-perception is that you are very mindful or very empathetic you might easily deduce that you do better than others and have to right their wrongs.
There is no golden rule and there are obvious exceptions, but if your empathy comes with a lot of animosity, you probably just deceived yourself.
Well, right mindfulness would allow you to see that self perception arise as distinct mental and physical sensations, and appropriately calm its fabrication. But, most people aren't practising correctly, I would think.
The initial episode covers a story closer to a cult. But later this podcast reflects a lot of what you’ve mentioned anecdotally with respect to to modern psychedelic research.
> The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.
> There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". .
It's pretty much my experience.
Yes, when you meditate, sometime some things will have to be broken or removed to let place to something new. Those temporary states are disagreable, and from the outside can be experienced as "panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of dissociation".
Unfortunatly, if a building is in a bad shape, there is no way around destroying some part of it to rebuild. And this takes time. Meanwhile, there is a hole.
It's not specific to meditation. You will see that in psychotherapy as well.
That's why having meditation teachers is important, because they have to help you through this, make you understand what's happening, that like all the things, it's temporary, and to keep it up.
And you are right when you say:
> But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen
Because the experience vary a lot from person to person. There is no typical path. Some will not live that. Some will live a very mild or short sample of that.
Meditation is not science. You can't predict how long things will go, or how long they will take. You even can't be exactly sure somebody is practicing correctly, nor that something else is not interracting with it in a bad way. That's why serious centers take so many precautions with beginers, but it's not perfect. It can't be.
And it would be tempting (also quite logical) to think "what I'm doing doesn't work, I'm worse than I used to be".
Unfortunatly yes, the old saying of "it will get harder before it gets easier" apply here in my experience. It will apply several times during a life of meditation, in cycles. Although it's way easier once you are experienced: you just use meditation as a way to go through it. It's what it's for after all.
There is no alternative to trusting it will pass. Like with a chemothery, where some patients feel terrible for a long time before they feel better, while some patients never fully recover, and some even die.
I went through all those stages in 16 years of meditation. Panic attacks. Depression. Dissociation. It sucks. The experience of a lot of meditants is that the practice does replace them with a better life eventually. The increase in happiness is, on average over a decade, very real and positive if you practice correctly, and keep at it.
But it's hard. It's also not something you can plan for.
Plus it can worry people around you, and even yourself. Which is a good thing: it means one cares about you.
I would understand than somebody doesn't want to take the risk.
I would state it's worth it, as I feel it is. But who knows, could be survivor bias.
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.
Readit News
I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".
More here:
- https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
- https://eudoxos.github.io/cfitness/html/index.html
- https://themindfulgeek.com/ plus a talk he gave at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xxsA9Bn-4
Also, I gotta say that language like "moral deficiencies" sounds incredibly broad without some examples. I think that speaks to the drawbacks of a religious context. I don't necessarily mean to direct these comments at you in particular (after all, I don't know what you meant by "moral deficiencies" without more info), but morality is a slippery topic and religion often seems to treat it like it isn't.
The pali word is "sila", the closest translation is morals. To be deficient in sila is to be deficient in morals, was my thought process. One example is do no harm, or avoid lying. If all your daily life is filled with causing harm, and deceit, then it will be filled with chaos and end up making it harder for you to make progress in awakening or do good stuff. This is one interpretation of karma (cause and effect).
There's a whole other philosophical side to it that I think about, outside of the Buddhist context. That certain choices or circumstances in life end up reducing your moral agency in this world. People can be born under unsafe, and unkind environments, so sometimes it becomes harder to be generous and kind, as if there was less wiggle room in your ability to act as a moral agent. One of the things Buddhism tries to address is removing the layers of conditioning in your mind and concept of self, to give you more freedom.
This is almost the opposite of Christianity, depending on what you mean by "right morals". Christianity says you simply can't reach salvation and be with God unless you are flawless, which is humanly impossible, so unless God does something... hence Christ.
If you are willing to confess your sin and repent for your mistakes with godly sorrow, God will forgive your trespasses.
Even the most handsy of trespassing priests is forgiven.
But like anything, institutions are run by humans and sometimes go the wrong way, focused on dogma, enrichment or power.
Wow! I haven't meditated before. That sounds like a lot of time.
Do you still meditate? What does it offer you? Has it offered you what you expected?
I am very good at deep work, and concentrating on stuff. It is also easy to deal with stress and emotions in my day to day. My life feels like playing a third person video game with the FOV slider turned to 360 degrees. Every sensation comes discretely where I can see the beginning and end. 1 second is a really long time, enough room to fit 1000s of sensations, bounded only by your speed of perception. I am aware of how my mind constructs the concept of time, the idea of later. The cool part about hitting stages of enlightenment is that there is a quantum shift in how your brain processes, that I know I cannot regress to a previous stage. But I wonder if awakening is built from physical, neural correlates, then things like dementia or a traumatic brain injury might reverse some of the effects.
Another interesting note is that I have a much higher pain tolerance, as well as sort of better control of my body movements. I know some people describe enlightenment as a full body transformation, not just the mind.
One thing that is keeping me from progressing further is the inconvenience that comes with sleep alterations caused by meditation, and how it affects my work as a programmer. I still have obligations to participate in modern society, pay bills, keep relationships, etc. And I know if I didn't do this, I would be perfectly content doing nothing all day, just meditating. It's why retreats and the monastic life is so conductive to awakening. Maybe this is the ultimate FIRE goal, I'm just working on the FI :)
For the record, the Buddha has never advocated leaving society, especially lay followers. Whether we are a monk, at a retreat, in a family, we all have a duty to be a wise citizen.
I'm not the OP, but after I practiced meditation intensely for a few months I found two huge benefits:
First: before I meditated I used to get annoyed and bored when I had to do chores like washing the dishes or standing in line. But after meditating for a while, when I had to do such a chore I'd just focus on my breath and I'd no longer feel bored or annoyed. In fact, such chores and waiting in line became almost pleasurable because they gave me an opportunity to meditate.
Second: when someone said something mean to me I would just focus on my breath and sort of catch myself about to get angry and saw that I had a choice whether to get angry or not. I didn't have to get drawn in to the hurricane of feelings as an unconscious reaction to the meanness directed at me. Instead I could just continue to focus on my breath and I wouldn't get angry at all.
Unfortunately, for some reason that I no longer remember, I fell off the wagon of meditating regularly and went back to my old easily bored, quick to anger self. I still try to meditate occasionally by focusing on my breath, but it doesn't help nearly as much as when I meditated regularly for hours at a time.
https://youtu.be/JOcoynQCmZ0
Highly recommend his channel by the way.
I was warned about it when I started getting "serious" about my practice, but I didn't believe it until I confronted it, face-to-face, on a daily basis. To this day I am the renegate and persona non grata at my Temple, ex except for the Abbot and my Zen Master who know how to tolerate, navigate, and leverage that BS for the greater good.
Samurai training is Buddhism training on steroids.
Regardless, my practice continue with a lot less time at the Temple, and I have relinquished my Center (the Center that I founded).
> The five spiritual faculties are said to be like a cart with four wheels and a driver. If any of the four wheels is too small, wobbly, or not in balance with the others, then the going on the spiritual road will be rough. The four wheels symbolize faith, wisdom, energy, and concentration. If the driver is not paying attention there will also be problems. The driver symbolizes mindfulness. [See SN 48.18, also Visuddhimagga, IV, 45.2.]
> The five spiritual faculties have also been presented in another order that can be useful: faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom. In this order, they apply to each of the three trainings, the first of which, as discussed earlier, is morality. We have faith that training in morality is a good idea and that we can do it, so we exert energy to live up to a standard of clear and skillful living. We realize that we must pay attention to our thoughts, words, and deeds in order to do this, so we try to be mindful of them. We realize that we often fail to pay attention, so we try to increase our ability to concentrate on how we live our life. In this way, through experience, we become wiser in a relative sense, learning how to live a good and useful life. Seeing our skill improve and the benefits it has for our life, we generate more faith, and so on.
https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...
Always thought it was faddish.
I've also seen it make some people more likely to fall into the trap of woo-science and dodgy, spiritual scams. The practice of awakening forces you to investigate the ways you suffer. Before, they may throw their money at these sketchy MLMs and still suffer. With meditation, they can throw their money at them and also suffer a lot less.
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!
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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
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 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.
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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.
That said, I wouldn't be dismissive about people learning to forgive themselves for their flaws ...
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?
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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.
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.
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...
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> Yet a growing body of research suggests that such stories may be surprisingly common, with one study from 2019 showing that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
The 25% number is pretty striking, if true. You see people recommending meditation without reservation, and discounting adverse effects as "exceptionally rare". Over the years I've begun to see more and more stories of people having deeply destabilizing experiences with meditation, and it concerns me how quickly people dismiss that possibility. There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen.
(And going back to psychedelics -- I have a similar complaint about people's attitudes around "bad trips". Psychonauts like to say "there's no such thing as a bad trip, only difficult ones", but I think that dangerously discounts how destabilizing trips can be sometimes.)
Yeah, and the interesting thing is that in many Eastern traditions, meditation wasn't ever even recommended for the average person. And those that did do it, did so in an environment with teachers and safeguards. The McMindfulness fad is missing almost all of that, and I'm starting to see more and more stories of people hitting a dangerous wall without the cultural support they need to navigate to the other side.
Sam Harris is one of the current major proponents of meditation in the West, and I've heard him say "even if meditation were bad for people, I would still recommend they do it". I think that's irresponsible advice.
There is no golden rule and there are obvious exceptions, but if your empathy comes with a lot of animosity, you probably just deceived yourself.
The initial episode covers a story closer to a cult. But later this podcast reflects a lot of what you’ve mentioned anecdotally with respect to to modern psychedelic research.
> There's even an attitude of "oh, that's a normal part of the process, just keep working through it and you'll come out the other side". .
It's pretty much my experience.
Yes, when you meditate, sometime some things will have to be broken or removed to let place to something new. Those temporary states are disagreable, and from the outside can be experienced as "panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of dissociation".
Unfortunatly, if a building is in a bad shape, there is no way around destroying some part of it to rebuild. And this takes time. Meanwhile, there is a hole.
It's not specific to meditation. You will see that in psychotherapy as well.
That's why having meditation teachers is important, because they have to help you through this, make you understand what's happening, that like all the things, it's temporary, and to keep it up.
And you are right when you say:
> But there's usually no informed consent going into a practice that this might happen
Because the experience vary a lot from person to person. There is no typical path. Some will not live that. Some will live a very mild or short sample of that.
Meditation is not science. You can't predict how long things will go, or how long they will take. You even can't be exactly sure somebody is practicing correctly, nor that something else is not interracting with it in a bad way. That's why serious centers take so many precautions with beginers, but it's not perfect. It can't be.
And it would be tempting (also quite logical) to think "what I'm doing doesn't work, I'm worse than I used to be".
Unfortunatly yes, the old saying of "it will get harder before it gets easier" apply here in my experience. It will apply several times during a life of meditation, in cycles. Although it's way easier once you are experienced: you just use meditation as a way to go through it. It's what it's for after all.
There is no alternative to trusting it will pass. Like with a chemothery, where some patients feel terrible for a long time before they feel better, while some patients never fully recover, and some even die.
I went through all those stages in 16 years of meditation. Panic attacks. Depression. Dissociation. It sucks. The experience of a lot of meditants is that the practice does replace them with a better life eventually. The increase in happiness is, on average over a decade, very real and positive if you practice correctly, and keep at it.
But it's hard. It's also not something you can plan for.
Plus it can worry people around you, and even yourself. Which is a good thing: it means one cares about you.
I would understand than somebody doesn't want to take the risk.
I would state it's worth it, as I feel it is. But who knows, could be survivor bias.
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.