Epistemic Status: I’ve spent a couple decades attempting to understand Buddhism from a non-mystical, scientific perspective, so I can appreciate a lot of the work you’ve put into this post. I don’t have much to add at this point in discussion of the science behind it all, but I do have some personal thoughts. I took refuge back around 2012, and my practice mostly centers around attempting to practice right speech, right thought, and right action. I am also trying to be somewhat non-chalant in my writing style, I’m still learning to develop it.
There isn’t much here to disagree with in my opinion, but I often wonder these days what it is that people who want to study Buddhism without practicing it are looking for. I fully admit as a child in the 80′s I fell in love with Japanese cartoons, martial arts, asian food and the esoteric mysticism of the East.
As a half jewish, half white male who came from a strong catholic and jewish background, living in the protestant midwest, I was looking for something different in terms of understanding my place in the world and the meaning of life anyway.
For various reasons, I came to Buddhism through the culture and media I immersed myself in at a time before the Internet; It came as part of a package deal along with training in and studying martial arts, appreciating asian food, culture and history and aspiring to learn Japanese. These all helped me to put Buddhism into an historical and social context, and I think this is a very important point.
I’m often offended at pop culture ideas surrounding ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ things, or even just half baked attempts to integrate different cultures and ideas. My mom studied Anthropology, Photography and Film studies/Media Critique and Women’s Studies in College as I was growing up, so I grew up with a healthy respect for other cultures, and how media is used to influence people. I think the Internet has really warped peoples ideas about how to ‘best’ or ‘respectfully’ integrate other peoples cultures into our own. Buddhism is a prime example to me.
As a teenager in the 90′s, I read more about Buddhism, and saw how it presented the world (mostly from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective through books by the Dalai Lama) and I wanted the happiness I thought was there. Through a life filled with counseling I also learned about and practiced CBT and psychotherapy, which I continue to engage with, study and research to this day, because of issues with Depression, PTSD, and ADD which still take up a fair amount of my time.
I developed interests in Cognitive/Neuro Psychology/Biology, Psychology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Computer Graphics, Media Studies and Sociology and they all paired well with an introspective approach to understanding myself and other people, but I still didn’t “get it.” I read a lot and thought a lot about Buddhism and what concepts like enlightenment meant. I meditated some, but did so without supervision and looking back, trying to do insight meditation without a teacher wasn’t responsible.
As someone who was very young at the time, I liked the idea of becoming “enlightened” and “letting go of my ego.” I believed I could learn to use my time and energy for the benefit of other people and put away my ‘selfish’ desires to help myself, and even thought this was desirable. This backfired as I became a people-pleaser, and still find it hard to put my needs ahead of other peoples to this day.
I can’t put this fully at the feet of my lone and ill advised forays into meditation, but it’s only much later I learned the idea that in order to let go of something, you have to have it first. I don’t think I had fully developed my ego at the point I started learning to “let it go” and healthy formation of identity is a crucial step to a happy life I think.
So I think the warning against meditating without a responsible guiding framework is particularly important. Personally, I also think having an actual teacher who comes from a Buddhist tradition is important, in order to put things into social and cultural perspective. While I see benefit to understanding the underlying structure and functions of the brain and consciousness—after all I have spent a fair amount of time reading and studying about it—I do think it’s possible to get so caught up in trying to understand it, that it ceases to become useful. I fully endorse the idea of a ‘middle way’ and ‘everything in moderation.’
Epistemic Statement: My opinion, based on slightly more than superficial study of Asian culture, but done over a long period of time. I’m not a teacher, so don’t take my word for it, but I’m fairly certain I’ve got at least a rough handle on some of these issues.
And I am unimpressed with ‘stealing’ other peoples cultures, and ignoring ideas we think are strange out of hand, as we tend to want the benefits without the responsibilities associated with them. My mom spent some time on a Navajo reservation as a young woman in the late 60′s, and at first wanted to put cameras into the hands of traditional people so that they could record their own cultures without the taint of mainstream prejudice (I’m paraphrasing badly.)
But she used to tell me as a kid the same story again and again, about the aboriginal tribes people who refused to have their pictures taken when photographers first started exploring tribal areas around the world. They believed that cameras ‘stole your soul’, and didn’t want to have anything to do with cameras. How silly is that?
She realized that not all cultures can benefit equally from technological advances, and just because you can make some cultural exchanges, certainly doesn’t mean the trades offs are fair. Native people have lost their cultures and their land, but we sure do have some interesting documentation of what their cultures looked like before modern society destroyed them. I think the same is potentially true of Buddhist practices and beliefs (and other traditional cultures being decimated as we speak.)
So issues like being able to put current concerns into historical context is sobering for me. Do I think everyone should learn to mediate? No, I don’t. Meditation, especially the type associated with Buddhism comes from a sort of horrible tradition in my opinion. Ascetics are generally people who have either been rejected by society, or have become disillusioned with it to the point they separate themselves from society.
By removing themselves from society and taking the time to explore their minds, they come to understand things about themselves and society, most people aren’t interested in knowing. Society has a hierarchy, some people get to ‘live’ life, while others suffer from poverty and scarcity. This is the way it is, not the way it should be in my opinion.
From my understanding, many religious orders—nuns and priesthoods—first develop out of a scarcity of resources within a society, so that by taking vows of chastity they avoid bringing new life into a world that can’t support more life, by taking vows of poverty they pull themselves out of the competition for money, food and other resources. By pulling themselves out of society, they stop contributing to the problems associated with over population and scarcity of resources, but they find they still have the rest of their lives to do something with. Why not sit in a corner, still, for hours on end every single day and then eat small healthy portions of food, get some good sleep and do it all over again the next day for the rest of your life?
They develop the introspective ability to ‘become happy’ with not having anything, with rejecting worldly pleasures (what most of us think of as ‘living our lives’) and they train themselves and other nuns or priests, to be able to live their lives in a way that reduces the stress on the communities they come from, but live apart from. Meditation wasn’t a path to happiness and peace and prosperity, it was in many ways a practice of self denial sometimes just short of committing suicide. How these initial traditions developed over time varied from country to country, but the main take away was learning to be happy without living life like ‘normal’ people.
This type of tradition stands in stark contrast to how most people want to benefit from Buddhist ideas and traditions today. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but many of the associate ideas, like Karma and Nirvana and Reincarnation, that come from Buddhist practices, often become distorted. Karma was what you exchanged your ability to ‘live’ your life for as a priest or nun. In this exchange, you hoped for either Nirvana, or being reborn at a higher level in your next life; this is what was supposed to motivate you to ‘right action, right thought, right speech’ as you denied yourself the ability to live like other people. There were a whole host of responsibilities that came along with the ‘benefits’ of meditation, which is why in some ways I think the study of Buddhism with out practicing it is much less ‘beneficial’ for the world at large.
Many of the problems associated with Religion in general can be attributed to Buddhism as well. That is to say that a reason many people offer for not wanting to practice Buddhism, is that it is an organized religion in the same vein as Christianity. But unlike Christianity, many of the practices, like meditation, which developed through non-western Religious traditions like Buddhism, continue to grow in popularity and gain traction in places like Scientific communities, whereas religions like Christianity tend to be considered an impedance to scientific inquiry and seem to be waning in popularity. As western society continues to develop socially and culturally, why is it we’re drawn to Buddhism, but don’t want to practice it?
I’ve heard of a lot of christian churches beginning to incorporate things like meditation and yoga and asian martial arts into their cultures, but I believe they tend to do it in a way that completely ignores the social and cultural heritages the practices come from. They don’t like the cultural connotations of the practices, and they get around this by removing the cultural aspects of the practice and just teach the ‘core principles’. So while they gain the benefits of the practices, they lose sight of the responsibilities that come along with them, by abandoning the ‘esoteric’ and ‘questionable’ aspects of them.
I’m not suggesting that ‘mysticism’ should be taught along side these practices. As rational people, considering pop culture ideas of ‘magic’ as fact should be hard to accept. But people who benefit from these practices do a disservice to all of us, when the traditions which balance out the benefits of a practice with the responsibility of the knowledge that comes with it, are put aside. In this Digital Age it’s too easy for some people to get ‘it’ all without giving back, and I think this understanding is somewhere near the heart of all that ‘mysticism’ and ‘esoteric’ and ‘mysterious’ stuff.
As someone who was very young at the time, I liked the idea of becoming “enlightened” and “letting go of my ego.” I believed I could learn to use my time and energy for the benefit of other people and put away my ‘selfish’ desires to help myself, and even thought this was desirable. This backfired as I became a people-pleaser, and still find it hard to put my needs ahead of other peoples to this day.
I can’t put this fully at the feet of my lone and ill advised forays into meditation, but it’s only much later I learned the idea that in order to let go of something, you have to have it first. I don’t think I had fully developed my ego at the point I started learning to “let it go” and healthy formation of identity is a crucial step to a happy life I think.
Great observation. I’ve experienced something similar (using meditative practices in an attempt to suppress my own needs and desires in a way that was ultimately detrimental). I also don’t think it was really caused by meditation; rather it was an emotional wound (or a form of craving) masquerading as a noble intention.
I don’t recall hearing the “in order to let go of something, you have to have it first” line before, but I love it. You could say that I’ve been working to develop my ego recently, for a similar reason—wanting to get to a point where my needs are actually met rather than actively denying them.
I also don’t think it was really caused by meditation; rather it was an emotional wound (or a form of craving) masquerading as a noble intention.
I would offer the following in an attempt to provide you with some benefit and urge a bit more compassion for yourself along this line of thought, although I can relate to your comment about craving masquerading as noble intention. I’m a lay buddhist, although I have thought about becoming a Monk at certain points in my life. My point is I can’t lay claim to an explanation of why I put it the way I did as being ‘the correct way’, with any strong appeal to credibility due to perfect lineage transmission.
But I can give you my thinking based on my studies and experience, and try to explain why I think it is both the meditation practice and the ‘wound’ you were referring to, but that it is the meditation practice that may be “at fault” for lack of a better phrase. A great thing about Buddhism is that in many ways it allows us to place the blame for our problems within the world instead of within ourselves, thereby removing a lot of unhelpful guilt in a Moral sense.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t work to correct our faults, only that they aren’t really our fault despite being in us. They are ours because they are in us, but we didn’t cause them, the world did. This is my opinion, but it is what I like about Buddhism in comparison to say Christiantiy, in which it is the original sin or Adam and Eve which caused all of humanities downfall, and it is my sinful nature (strong emphasis on appealing to a very subjective Moral authority) which is my problem. Without Jesus I’m lost, and the ideas about Good and Evil are very black and white. Plus, there is a strong correlation in many churches between Moral Superiority and Financial Wellbeing. If you are poor or out of work, it’s implied you are a moral failure, and either lazy or too stupid to know how to pull your self out of poverty. The moral status of the individual is the anchor point around which the entire world orbits, whether you are at the top of the heap or the bottom.
In Buddhism I find there is less of a correlation between ‘Goodness’ and ‘money.’ If you have money you can still be a horrible person, and if you are poor, you can still be a good person. From my perspective having lived in the shelter system for around 4 years now, and having grown up in poverty, Western tradition really seems to revolve around this tight relationship between Goodness and financial prosperity being divinely linked. I think this is a flaw in society. Without going into it too much, Eastern culture also equates money with Goodness in many ways, but I think there is more acceptance that poverty isn’t necessarily caused by poor people making immoral choices, society is just a corrupting force.
One of the great things, from a Buddhist perspective, about being a human is the ability to come into contact with the Dharma. As a rock, or an animal, we couldn’t benefit from the Dharma really, as we wouldn’t have the facilities to understand it or practice it, but as humans we can. In this day and age it is even easier to come into contact with it, it’s all over the Internet, and many more communities today have some sort of Buddhist center. It’s gotten so much simpler to come into contact with it today than it was when I was a kid, before the Internet. I had to ride an hour and a half each way to get to a library which may or may not have a 20 year old book on Buddhism on the shelf. Most of my books early on I got from Borders or from academic libraries because there was no where else to get them. I had to spend a huge amount of time and energy to find Dharma, but these days it’s a completely different story.
Being a human allows us to understand the causes of suffering, and to learn to practice to alleviate it, as long as we have access to the Dharma. Animals and people without access to the Dharma are unlikely to understand the causes of suffering and be able to learn to practice to alleviate it, so by being human and having access to it, we are very lucky. At least according to Buddhist thinking. I tend to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t practice or study it.
A downside to having all this access to Dharma through mediums like the Internet and academic institutions though, is that in addition to presenting wisdom and knowledge from the entire spectrum of Buddhist traditions, there is all the information from all the non-Buddhists who have pulled ideas, concepts and practices from Buddhist tradition and attempted to ‘translate’ them into more modern and more ‘effective’ versions. There’s a lot of mis and disinformation about the Dharma floating around out there.
So maybe closer to the point, finding and developing a healthy relationship with an experienced teacher isn’t as easy as finding the Dharma. This is also not our fault. So while we might have it at our finger tips, without a good guide, we won’t know what have or how to use it well. Even if we read and learn on our own, we are likely to make a lot of mistakes because we are flawed in our perceptions—not necessarily in a moral way though. We aren’t ‘bad’, just confused and ignorant, blinded by illusion.
But the Dharma isn’t as easy to use as something like Netflix on the Internet. We can’t download it or stream it and expect it to work similarly. We can’t read about it and expect to understand it without help. We can’t practice it and expect not to make mistakes. We can’t pass on what we don’t have either. Which is why a teacher is so important. If we want to benefit from Yoga, we have to practice it, not just study it. If we don’t have a good teacher, we may practice it wrong and hurt ourselves.
Academic institutes can be a mixed bag. Surveys of ‘all’ Buddhist teachings and practices I think, like most aggregate sets of diverse information, tend to want a one size fits all solution to whatever ails you. Practicing based on selecting for benefits while avoiding as much of the ‘downsides’ as possible, isn’t really possible in reality. Hoping to come up with a lowest common denominator approach to utilizing the ‘strengths of a diverse selection’ of practices tends to remove most cultural, social and historic context which I jokingly refer to as a sort of ‘American Cheesination’ of non american cultural practices.
American cheese is probably the most unhealthy and bad tasting of all cheeses, simply because it is so heavily processed. Corporate America (and therefore the average American) loves this approach of trying to create benefit while trying to avoid side effects for instance. This has lead to a number of issues with consumer health, and is the concern of the FDA and how it regulates/misregulates food and drugs. The fallacy goes like this: ‘we’ want the flavor Fat offers in our foods without the actual Fat—which is what created Olestra—and we want the sweetness and energy of sugar without the calories—which created a whole slew of artificial sweetenters and sugar substitutes.
These attempts to scientifically synthesize a desirable product without the associated ‘down sides’ simply led to a shift in the types of ‘down sides’ the new product has. The disgusting and painful side effects of Olestra meant it was pulled from the market, and personally I can’t stand artificial sugar, I won’t buy a product if it contains it, and I’m pretty sure most people who say they like the taste are lying.
All joking aside, specific Buddhist traditions and practices tend to have a consistency to them, that allows you to check your own experience of your practice against a long history of other practitioners experiences. Basically the practices have been around a long long time, which is something modern versions of meditation and psychotherapies which incorporate it, or modern highly processed foods tend to lack; Cultureless Culture, Fatless Fats and Sugarless Sugars just don’t have a long history of successful benefit to humanity.
That’s not to say modern science doesn’t have a lot of data to pull from, only that most of the data doesn’t go back all that far, maybe a few hundred years at most concerning issues like consciousness and the assorted phenomenon. And despite the fact, or possibly because, there is so much data to sort through—of varying quality and often incredibly sparse distribution across the entire spectrum of human experience—modern regulatory bodies and scientific communities don’t seem to be able to come to many decent conclusions about what the ‘truth’ is regarding healthy diet, healthy lifestyles, or healthy psychological makeup or cultural practice.
Which brings us back to mental health and any possible benefits to meditation. Everybody has ‘wounds’ of the type I think you are referring—after all a central tenet to most if not all Buddhist practice and thinking is that “life is suffering” and wounds whether physical, emotional or psychological represent a type of suffering—so this is not really the solvable problem IMO. To just not have any ‘wounds’ is impossible, even the most well adjusted person in the world experiences suffering, so simply living life unwounded isn’t a reality.
But since we all suffer from ‘the illusion of self’- the compounded wounds, biases, and limitations of perception and understanding which make us human and not omniscient gods—it is this which is ‘the barrier’ to knowing the truth. Having ‘wounds’ (suffering) is a universal characteristic of all life, as all life suffers; it is the selection and practice of solutions which is the area Buddhist practice focus on, not necessarily the belief that our ‘wounds’ are the problem. Wounds are a fact of life, not an optional factor of life. If it were optional, none of us would probably choose to be wounded or to have biases or emotional or psychological issues, but then we wouldn’t be human either.
So it’s the lack of, and/or incorrect selection of ‘correct’ ways to deal with our ‘wounds’ where real progress can be made or abandoned. Different types of meditations have different effects, and different people have different ‘wounds’, or what others might term cognitive distortions, or still others might term biases, beliefs, habits,etc. There are many many ways people are deluded from ‘truth’, many ways that ‘life is an illusion’ so this should not be the point of contention I think.
“But there is a path to cessation of suffering” which means there are solutions, and “it is the Dharma.” means knowing and practicing ‘the truth’ is the solution. The question is actually then, “what is the Dharma and how do we practice it?” (This is the concern of many Buddhist traditions and practices, of which meditation is part.) So the ‘problem’ becomes how to choose which practices to select, of which meditation is just one type of practice, and how to know if we are practicing them correctly. This is where a qualified teacher becomes invaluable.
Most people want to meditate, because they believe this is where the true benefit comes from. I believe there are many benefits to meditation, but there are other practices as well. In some cases though, there are advanced types of meditation. Like advanced classes in college, Advanced Meditations have prerequisites. These meditations are many of the meditations that involve culturally specific ideas, concepts and practices and can vary widely from sect to sect. This is where mistranslations can have negative effects, and where attempts to gain the benefits of these practices without accruing the associated ‘down sides’ simply results in the shifting of the downsides to some other facet of your personality or identity, not the elimination of the downsides.
These are just some examples of a model of Social Physics I’m working on, as it appears to be the case that in modern attempts to derive benefit without downsides from processed products and practices, the downsides are simply shifted - the benefits and downsides are entangled such that you can’t have one without the other. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction—for every benefit you create, there is an equal but opposite downside created. (Also I think this involves the conservation of energy and mass—if you replace energy with benefit, and mass with downside. So the conservation of benefit and downside. But this is still a theory in development.)
I think the same is true of understanding our minds, and trying to put those understandings into action. Our actions have consequences for ourselves and others—and I think humans are particularly bad at understanding the ‘correct way’ of applying those filters to our lives. Often when I have concern for myself, it would be more ‘correct’ to have more concern for others, and vice versa. So that the type of emotional wound you are referring to has an affect on how we perceive our relationship to the world around us, including other people, and the ‘distorting’ effect those ‘flaws’ in our perception have is actually more complicated than most people consider when responding to the world viewed through a lens with such a compounded wound.
Not only is there ‘distortion’ in the ways we perceive the world through the lens that contains the emotional wound or bias, there is distortion in the way that experience is encoded into our neurology in the form of different types of ideas and concepts about the world being ‘modeled’ in our minds, which are in turn consolidated into ‘flawed’ memories. The longer we rely on these ‘flawed’ neural loops, the more they influence the growth and construction of our central nervous system, and consequently our peripheral nervous system, so that they get ‘encoded’ into our emotional ‘brains’ and into our muscle memory, resulting in emotional and physical and/or behavioral ‘disorders.’ I study trauma as well, and it’s the physicality of the source of the these disturbances which I think is sometimes counterintuitive to people who think ‘it’s all in their heads.’ It’s not, it’s all throughout our bodies.
These distortions can become particularly problematic when we start examining our selves through lenses that come from other cultures, like Buddhist type meditations as they spread through non-buddhist communities. The traditional eastern approaches to dealing with the common disturbances to the practitioners ‘system’, typically involve frameworks which develop to help explain what’s going on (chakras, Chi, Qi, etc. etc) but become wild cards of sorts if there isn’t anyone in the non-buddhist practitioners community with the social, cultural and historical practice or experience to make cross cultural interpretations of the ‘mystic, esoteric’ stuff in the non-Buddhist community.
These frameworks are often meant to be ‘safety valves’ designed to create literal neural structure along ‘correct’ neural loops, through repeated adherence to rules of conduct: right thought, right action, right speech, or any of the other practices meant to train the practitioners Peripheral Nervous System/Central Nervous System to be able to safely handle the possible disruptions to the practitioners sense of self, community, and conceptual relationship to the real world. This can often result from the changing of thoughts, actions, and speech caused by attempts to ‘polish the flaws out of our lenses of perception’ through practices like meditation. A bit like having a new pair of powerful glasses, it takes us awhile to get used to new ways of seeing the world.
In particular Insight meditation can cause exactly this type of change in perception, because it introduces us to new, sometimes alien concepts which might cause paradigm shifts in our thinking. These concepts like ‘no self’, ‘illusion of self’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘nirvana’, ‘karma’ and so on, tend to be integral parts of Insight meditation and by integrating them into our understanding of ourselves and our world, we run the risk of misunderstanding them, and so ‘scratching the lens’ and making the flaws worse instead of ‘polishing them’ and making our perceptions more accurate.
IMO the Universe as perceived by humans is flawed, but despite the fact that the flaws are in our perception of the Universe and not in the Universe itself, it is not our faults that we misperceive it. If we have access to the Dharma, but don’t practice it, then I think it is possible to accept more of the blame for our faults and how we negatively effect the world. And this is where the guilt trip comes in. Once you know the truth, if you don’t act on it, you better have a good reason. If you don’t know the truth though, it’s difficult to assume responsibility for not working for it or towards it. However, if you actively hide from or ignore the truth, that’s where some real problems start I think.
This was a very thought-provoking post. But I don’t fully understand what you are trying to say.
You say that Buddhist meditation developed in a context of severe inequality and poverty—which are obviously not good things. Then you say that Buddhist meditation should not be divorced from its cultural context. I did not understand exactly what context you believe we need to preserve. Could you please elaborate on that?
Epistemic Status: I’ve spent a couple decades attempting to understand Buddhism from a non-mystical, scientific perspective, so I can appreciate a lot of the work you’ve put into this post. I don’t have much to add at this point in discussion of the science behind it all, but I do have some personal thoughts. I took refuge back around 2012, and my practice mostly centers around attempting to practice right speech, right thought, and right action. I am also trying to be somewhat non-chalant in my writing style, I’m still learning to develop it.
There isn’t much here to disagree with in my opinion, but I often wonder these days what it is that people who want to study Buddhism without practicing it are looking for. I fully admit as a child in the 80′s I fell in love with Japanese cartoons, martial arts, asian food and the esoteric mysticism of the East.
As a half jewish, half white male who came from a strong catholic and jewish background, living in the protestant midwest, I was looking for something different in terms of understanding my place in the world and the meaning of life anyway.
For various reasons, I came to Buddhism through the culture and media I immersed myself in at a time before the Internet; It came as part of a package deal along with training in and studying martial arts, appreciating asian food, culture and history and aspiring to learn Japanese. These all helped me to put Buddhism into an historical and social context, and I think this is a very important point.
I’m often offended at pop culture ideas surrounding ‘esoteric’ or ‘mystical’ things, or even just half baked attempts to integrate different cultures and ideas. My mom studied Anthropology, Photography and Film studies/Media Critique and Women’s Studies in College as I was growing up, so I grew up with a healthy respect for other cultures, and how media is used to influence people. I think the Internet has really warped peoples ideas about how to ‘best’ or ‘respectfully’ integrate other peoples cultures into our own. Buddhism is a prime example to me.
As a teenager in the 90′s, I read more about Buddhism, and saw how it presented the world (mostly from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective through books by the Dalai Lama) and I wanted the happiness I thought was there. Through a life filled with counseling I also learned about and practiced CBT and psychotherapy, which I continue to engage with, study and research to this day, because of issues with Depression, PTSD, and ADD which still take up a fair amount of my time.
I developed interests in Cognitive/Neuro Psychology/Biology, Psychology, Theoretical Physics, Art, Computer Graphics, Media Studies and Sociology and they all paired well with an introspective approach to understanding myself and other people, but I still didn’t “get it.” I read a lot and thought a lot about Buddhism and what concepts like enlightenment meant. I meditated some, but did so without supervision and looking back, trying to do insight meditation without a teacher wasn’t responsible.
As someone who was very young at the time, I liked the idea of becoming “enlightened” and “letting go of my ego.” I believed I could learn to use my time and energy for the benefit of other people and put away my ‘selfish’ desires to help myself, and even thought this was desirable. This backfired as I became a people-pleaser, and still find it hard to put my needs ahead of other peoples to this day.
I can’t put this fully at the feet of my lone and ill advised forays into meditation, but it’s only much later I learned the idea that in order to let go of something, you have to have it first. I don’t think I had fully developed my ego at the point I started learning to “let it go” and healthy formation of identity is a crucial step to a happy life I think.
So I think the warning against meditating without a responsible guiding framework is particularly important. Personally, I also think having an actual teacher who comes from a Buddhist tradition is important, in order to put things into social and cultural perspective. While I see benefit to understanding the underlying structure and functions of the brain and consciousness—after all I have spent a fair amount of time reading and studying about it—I do think it’s possible to get so caught up in trying to understand it, that it ceases to become useful. I fully endorse the idea of a ‘middle way’ and ‘everything in moderation.’
Epistemic Statement: My opinion, based on slightly more than superficial study of Asian culture, but done over a long period of time. I’m not a teacher, so don’t take my word for it, but I’m fairly certain I’ve got at least a rough handle on some of these issues.
And I am unimpressed with ‘stealing’ other peoples cultures, and ignoring ideas we think are strange out of hand, as we tend to want the benefits without the responsibilities associated with them. My mom spent some time on a Navajo reservation as a young woman in the late 60′s, and at first wanted to put cameras into the hands of traditional people so that they could record their own cultures without the taint of mainstream prejudice (I’m paraphrasing badly.)
But she used to tell me as a kid the same story again and again, about the aboriginal tribes people who refused to have their pictures taken when photographers first started exploring tribal areas around the world. They believed that cameras ‘stole your soul’, and didn’t want to have anything to do with cameras. How silly is that?
She realized that not all cultures can benefit equally from technological advances, and just because you can make some cultural exchanges, certainly doesn’t mean the trades offs are fair. Native people have lost their cultures and their land, but we sure do have some interesting documentation of what their cultures looked like before modern society destroyed them. I think the same is potentially true of Buddhist practices and beliefs (and other traditional cultures being decimated as we speak.)
So issues like being able to put current concerns into historical context is sobering for me. Do I think everyone should learn to mediate? No, I don’t. Meditation, especially the type associated with Buddhism comes from a sort of horrible tradition in my opinion. Ascetics are generally people who have either been rejected by society, or have become disillusioned with it to the point they separate themselves from society.
By removing themselves from society and taking the time to explore their minds, they come to understand things about themselves and society, most people aren’t interested in knowing. Society has a hierarchy, some people get to ‘live’ life, while others suffer from poverty and scarcity. This is the way it is, not the way it should be in my opinion.
From my understanding, many religious orders—nuns and priesthoods—first develop out of a scarcity of resources within a society, so that by taking vows of chastity they avoid bringing new life into a world that can’t support more life, by taking vows of poverty they pull themselves out of the competition for money, food and other resources. By pulling themselves out of society, they stop contributing to the problems associated with over population and scarcity of resources, but they find they still have the rest of their lives to do something with. Why not sit in a corner, still, for hours on end every single day and then eat small healthy portions of food, get some good sleep and do it all over again the next day for the rest of your life?
They develop the introspective ability to ‘become happy’ with not having anything, with rejecting worldly pleasures (what most of us think of as ‘living our lives’) and they train themselves and other nuns or priests, to be able to live their lives in a way that reduces the stress on the communities they come from, but live apart from. Meditation wasn’t a path to happiness and peace and prosperity, it was in many ways a practice of self denial sometimes just short of committing suicide. How these initial traditions developed over time varied from country to country, but the main take away was learning to be happy without living life like ‘normal’ people.
This type of tradition stands in stark contrast to how most people want to benefit from Buddhist ideas and traditions today. People want to have their cake and eat it too, but many of the associate ideas, like Karma and Nirvana and Reincarnation, that come from Buddhist practices, often become distorted. Karma was what you exchanged your ability to ‘live’ your life for as a priest or nun. In this exchange, you hoped for either Nirvana, or being reborn at a higher level in your next life; this is what was supposed to motivate you to ‘right action, right thought, right speech’ as you denied yourself the ability to live like other people. There were a whole host of responsibilities that came along with the ‘benefits’ of meditation, which is why in some ways I think the study of Buddhism with out practicing it is much less ‘beneficial’ for the world at large.
Many of the problems associated with Religion in general can be attributed to Buddhism as well. That is to say that a reason many people offer for not wanting to practice Buddhism, is that it is an organized religion in the same vein as Christianity. But unlike Christianity, many of the practices, like meditation, which developed through non-western Religious traditions like Buddhism, continue to grow in popularity and gain traction in places like Scientific communities, whereas religions like Christianity tend to be considered an impedance to scientific inquiry and seem to be waning in popularity. As western society continues to develop socially and culturally, why is it we’re drawn to Buddhism, but don’t want to practice it?
I’ve heard of a lot of christian churches beginning to incorporate things like meditation and yoga and asian martial arts into their cultures, but I believe they tend to do it in a way that completely ignores the social and cultural heritages the practices come from. They don’t like the cultural connotations of the practices, and they get around this by removing the cultural aspects of the practice and just teach the ‘core principles’. So while they gain the benefits of the practices, they lose sight of the responsibilities that come along with them, by abandoning the ‘esoteric’ and ‘questionable’ aspects of them.
I’m not suggesting that ‘mysticism’ should be taught along side these practices. As rational people, considering pop culture ideas of ‘magic’ as fact should be hard to accept. But people who benefit from these practices do a disservice to all of us, when the traditions which balance out the benefits of a practice with the responsibility of the knowledge that comes with it, are put aside. In this Digital Age it’s too easy for some people to get ‘it’ all without giving back, and I think this understanding is somewhere near the heart of all that ‘mysticism’ and ‘esoteric’ and ‘mysterious’ stuff.
Great observation. I’ve experienced something similar (using meditative practices in an attempt to suppress my own needs and desires in a way that was ultimately detrimental). I also don’t think it was really caused by meditation; rather it was an emotional wound (or a form of craving) masquerading as a noble intention.
I don’t recall hearing the “in order to let go of something, you have to have it first” line before, but I love it. You could say that I’ve been working to develop my ego recently, for a similar reason—wanting to get to a point where my needs are actually met rather than actively denying them.
I would offer the following in an attempt to provide you with some benefit and urge a bit more compassion for yourself along this line of thought, although I can relate to your comment about craving masquerading as noble intention. I’m a lay buddhist, although I have thought about becoming a Monk at certain points in my life. My point is I can’t lay claim to an explanation of why I put it the way I did as being ‘the correct way’, with any strong appeal to credibility due to perfect lineage transmission.
But I can give you my thinking based on my studies and experience, and try to explain why I think it is both the meditation practice and the ‘wound’ you were referring to, but that it is the meditation practice that may be “at fault” for lack of a better phrase. A great thing about Buddhism is that in many ways it allows us to place the blame for our problems within the world instead of within ourselves, thereby removing a lot of unhelpful guilt in a Moral sense.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t work to correct our faults, only that they aren’t really our fault despite being in us. They are ours because they are in us, but we didn’t cause them, the world did. This is my opinion, but it is what I like about Buddhism in comparison to say Christiantiy, in which it is the original sin or Adam and Eve which caused all of humanities downfall, and it is my sinful nature (strong emphasis on appealing to a very subjective Moral authority) which is my problem. Without Jesus I’m lost, and the ideas about Good and Evil are very black and white. Plus, there is a strong correlation in many churches between Moral Superiority and Financial Wellbeing. If you are poor or out of work, it’s implied you are a moral failure, and either lazy or too stupid to know how to pull your self out of poverty. The moral status of the individual is the anchor point around which the entire world orbits, whether you are at the top of the heap or the bottom.
In Buddhism I find there is less of a correlation between ‘Goodness’ and ‘money.’ If you have money you can still be a horrible person, and if you are poor, you can still be a good person. From my perspective having lived in the shelter system for around 4 years now, and having grown up in poverty, Western tradition really seems to revolve around this tight relationship between Goodness and financial prosperity being divinely linked. I think this is a flaw in society. Without going into it too much, Eastern culture also equates money with Goodness in many ways, but I think there is more acceptance that poverty isn’t necessarily caused by poor people making immoral choices, society is just a corrupting force.
One of the great things, from a Buddhist perspective, about being a human is the ability to come into contact with the Dharma. As a rock, or an animal, we couldn’t benefit from the Dharma really, as we wouldn’t have the facilities to understand it or practice it, but as humans we can. In this day and age it is even easier to come into contact with it, it’s all over the Internet, and many more communities today have some sort of Buddhist center. It’s gotten so much simpler to come into contact with it today than it was when I was a kid, before the Internet. I had to ride an hour and a half each way to get to a library which may or may not have a 20 year old book on Buddhism on the shelf. Most of my books early on I got from Borders or from academic libraries because there was no where else to get them. I had to spend a huge amount of time and energy to find Dharma, but these days it’s a completely different story.
Being a human allows us to understand the causes of suffering, and to learn to practice to alleviate it, as long as we have access to the Dharma. Animals and people without access to the Dharma are unlikely to understand the causes of suffering and be able to learn to practice to alleviate it, so by being human and having access to it, we are very lucky. At least according to Buddhist thinking. I tend to agree, otherwise I wouldn’t practice or study it.
A downside to having all this access to Dharma through mediums like the Internet and academic institutions though, is that in addition to presenting wisdom and knowledge from the entire spectrum of Buddhist traditions, there is all the information from all the non-Buddhists who have pulled ideas, concepts and practices from Buddhist tradition and attempted to ‘translate’ them into more modern and more ‘effective’ versions. There’s a lot of mis and disinformation about the Dharma floating around out there.
So maybe closer to the point, finding and developing a healthy relationship with an experienced teacher isn’t as easy as finding the Dharma. This is also not our fault. So while we might have it at our finger tips, without a good guide, we won’t know what have or how to use it well. Even if we read and learn on our own, we are likely to make a lot of mistakes because we are flawed in our perceptions—not necessarily in a moral way though. We aren’t ‘bad’, just confused and ignorant, blinded by illusion.
But the Dharma isn’t as easy to use as something like Netflix on the Internet. We can’t download it or stream it and expect it to work similarly. We can’t read about it and expect to understand it without help. We can’t practice it and expect not to make mistakes. We can’t pass on what we don’t have either. Which is why a teacher is so important. If we want to benefit from Yoga, we have to practice it, not just study it. If we don’t have a good teacher, we may practice it wrong and hurt ourselves.
Academic institutes can be a mixed bag. Surveys of ‘all’ Buddhist teachings and practices I think, like most aggregate sets of diverse information, tend to want a one size fits all solution to whatever ails you. Practicing based on selecting for benefits while avoiding as much of the ‘downsides’ as possible, isn’t really possible in reality. Hoping to come up with a lowest common denominator approach to utilizing the ‘strengths of a diverse selection’ of practices tends to remove most cultural, social and historic context which I jokingly refer to as a sort of ‘American Cheesination’ of non american cultural practices.
American cheese is probably the most unhealthy and bad tasting of all cheeses, simply because it is so heavily processed. Corporate America (and therefore the average American) loves this approach of trying to create benefit while trying to avoid side effects for instance. This has lead to a number of issues with consumer health, and is the concern of the FDA and how it regulates/misregulates food and drugs. The fallacy goes like this: ‘we’ want the flavor Fat offers in our foods without the actual Fat—which is what created Olestra—and we want the sweetness and energy of sugar without the calories—which created a whole slew of artificial sweetenters and sugar substitutes.
These attempts to scientifically synthesize a desirable product without the associated ‘down sides’ simply led to a shift in the types of ‘down sides’ the new product has. The disgusting and painful side effects of Olestra meant it was pulled from the market, and personally I can’t stand artificial sugar, I won’t buy a product if it contains it, and I’m pretty sure most people who say they like the taste are lying.
All joking aside, specific Buddhist traditions and practices tend to have a consistency to them, that allows you to check your own experience of your practice against a long history of other practitioners experiences. Basically the practices have been around a long long time, which is something modern versions of meditation and psychotherapies which incorporate it, or modern highly processed foods tend to lack; Cultureless Culture, Fatless Fats and Sugarless Sugars just don’t have a long history of successful benefit to humanity.
That’s not to say modern science doesn’t have a lot of data to pull from, only that most of the data doesn’t go back all that far, maybe a few hundred years at most concerning issues like consciousness and the assorted phenomenon. And despite the fact, or possibly because, there is so much data to sort through—of varying quality and often incredibly sparse distribution across the entire spectrum of human experience—modern regulatory bodies and scientific communities don’t seem to be able to come to many decent conclusions about what the ‘truth’ is regarding healthy diet, healthy lifestyles, or healthy psychological makeup or cultural practice.
Which brings us back to mental health and any possible benefits to meditation. Everybody has ‘wounds’ of the type I think you are referring—after all a central tenet to most if not all Buddhist practice and thinking is that “life is suffering” and wounds whether physical, emotional or psychological represent a type of suffering—so this is not really the solvable problem IMO. To just not have any ‘wounds’ is impossible, even the most well adjusted person in the world experiences suffering, so simply living life unwounded isn’t a reality.
But since we all suffer from ‘the illusion of self’- the compounded wounds, biases, and limitations of perception and understanding which make us human and not omniscient gods—it is this which is ‘the barrier’ to knowing the truth. Having ‘wounds’ (suffering) is a universal characteristic of all life, as all life suffers; it is the selection and practice of solutions which is the area Buddhist practice focus on, not necessarily the belief that our ‘wounds’ are the problem. Wounds are a fact of life, not an optional factor of life. If it were optional, none of us would probably choose to be wounded or to have biases or emotional or psychological issues, but then we wouldn’t be human either.
So it’s the lack of, and/or incorrect selection of ‘correct’ ways to deal with our ‘wounds’ where real progress can be made or abandoned. Different types of meditations have different effects, and different people have different ‘wounds’, or what others might term cognitive distortions, or still others might term biases, beliefs, habits,etc. There are many many ways people are deluded from ‘truth’, many ways that ‘life is an illusion’ so this should not be the point of contention I think.
“But there is a path to cessation of suffering” which means there are solutions, and “it is the Dharma.” means knowing and practicing ‘the truth’ is the solution. The question is actually then, “what is the Dharma and how do we practice it?” (This is the concern of many Buddhist traditions and practices, of which meditation is part.) So the ‘problem’ becomes how to choose which practices to select, of which meditation is just one type of practice, and how to know if we are practicing them correctly. This is where a qualified teacher becomes invaluable.
Most people want to meditate, because they believe this is where the true benefit comes from. I believe there are many benefits to meditation, but there are other practices as well. In some cases though, there are advanced types of meditation. Like advanced classes in college, Advanced Meditations have prerequisites. These meditations are many of the meditations that involve culturally specific ideas, concepts and practices and can vary widely from sect to sect. This is where mistranslations can have negative effects, and where attempts to gain the benefits of these practices without accruing the associated ‘down sides’ simply results in the shifting of the downsides to some other facet of your personality or identity, not the elimination of the downsides.
These are just some examples of a model of Social Physics I’m working on, as it appears to be the case that in modern attempts to derive benefit without downsides from processed products and practices, the downsides are simply shifted - the benefits and downsides are entangled such that you can’t have one without the other. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction—for every benefit you create, there is an equal but opposite downside created. (Also I think this involves the conservation of energy and mass—if you replace energy with benefit, and mass with downside. So the conservation of benefit and downside. But this is still a theory in development.)
I think the same is true of understanding our minds, and trying to put those understandings into action. Our actions have consequences for ourselves and others—and I think humans are particularly bad at understanding the ‘correct way’ of applying those filters to our lives. Often when I have concern for myself, it would be more ‘correct’ to have more concern for others, and vice versa. So that the type of emotional wound you are referring to has an affect on how we perceive our relationship to the world around us, including other people, and the ‘distorting’ effect those ‘flaws’ in our perception have is actually more complicated than most people consider when responding to the world viewed through a lens with such a compounded wound.
Not only is there ‘distortion’ in the ways we perceive the world through the lens that contains the emotional wound or bias, there is distortion in the way that experience is encoded into our neurology in the form of different types of ideas and concepts about the world being ‘modeled’ in our minds, which are in turn consolidated into ‘flawed’ memories. The longer we rely on these ‘flawed’ neural loops, the more they influence the growth and construction of our central nervous system, and consequently our peripheral nervous system, so that they get ‘encoded’ into our emotional ‘brains’ and into our muscle memory, resulting in emotional and physical and/or behavioral ‘disorders.’ I study trauma as well, and it’s the physicality of the source of the these disturbances which I think is sometimes counterintuitive to people who think ‘it’s all in their heads.’ It’s not, it’s all throughout our bodies.
These distortions can become particularly problematic when we start examining our selves through lenses that come from other cultures, like Buddhist type meditations as they spread through non-buddhist communities. The traditional eastern approaches to dealing with the common disturbances to the practitioners ‘system’, typically involve frameworks which develop to help explain what’s going on (chakras, Chi, Qi, etc. etc) but become wild cards of sorts if there isn’t anyone in the non-buddhist practitioners community with the social, cultural and historical practice or experience to make cross cultural interpretations of the ‘mystic, esoteric’ stuff in the non-Buddhist community.
These frameworks are often meant to be ‘safety valves’ designed to create literal neural structure along ‘correct’ neural loops, through repeated adherence to rules of conduct: right thought, right action, right speech, or any of the other practices meant to train the practitioners Peripheral Nervous System/Central Nervous System to be able to safely handle the possible disruptions to the practitioners sense of self, community, and conceptual relationship to the real world. This can often result from the changing of thoughts, actions, and speech caused by attempts to ‘polish the flaws out of our lenses of perception’ through practices like meditation. A bit like having a new pair of powerful glasses, it takes us awhile to get used to new ways of seeing the world.
In particular Insight meditation can cause exactly this type of change in perception, because it introduces us to new, sometimes alien concepts which might cause paradigm shifts in our thinking. These concepts like ‘no self’, ‘illusion of self’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘nirvana’, ‘karma’ and so on, tend to be integral parts of Insight meditation and by integrating them into our understanding of ourselves and our world, we run the risk of misunderstanding them, and so ‘scratching the lens’ and making the flaws worse instead of ‘polishing them’ and making our perceptions more accurate.
IMO the Universe as perceived by humans is flawed, but despite the fact that the flaws are in our perception of the Universe and not in the Universe itself, it is not our faults that we misperceive it. If we have access to the Dharma, but don’t practice it, then I think it is possible to accept more of the blame for our faults and how we negatively effect the world. And this is where the guilt trip comes in. Once you know the truth, if you don’t act on it, you better have a good reason. If you don’t know the truth though, it’s difficult to assume responsibility for not working for it or towards it. However, if you actively hide from or ignore the truth, that’s where some real problems start I think.
I hope you are still reading replies here. 🙂
This was a very thought-provoking post. But I don’t fully understand what you are trying to say.
You say that Buddhist meditation developed in a context of severe inequality and poverty—which are obviously not good things. Then you say that Buddhist meditation should not be divorced from its cultural context. I did not understand exactly what context you believe we need to preserve. Could you please elaborate on that?