I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest. Back through the tunnels—through the devious status-and-survival strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we remember in dreams—all the streets we have ever traveled, the corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the womb, the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the timeless wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns. Down and back through ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler—a thin string of molecules going through the trial and error of getting itself into the right order to be a unit of organic life. Relentlessly back and back through endless and whirling dances in the astronomically proportioned spaces which surround the original nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as remotely distant on the inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the outside.
Down and at last out—out of the cosmic maze to recognize in and as myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten yet familiar sensation of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity, inmost light, ultimate center, self more me than myself. Standing in the midst of Ella’s garden I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home behind home, that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning. Plucked like the strings of a harp, the warp and woof of the world reverberate with memories of triumphant hymns. The sure foundation upon which I had sought to stand has turned out to be the center from which I seek. The elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe is discovered as the immediate gesture of my hand. But how did I ever get lost? And why have I traveled so far through these intertwined tunnels that I seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my conventional self?
--Alan Watts
If you’re going to double-down on the idea of “deep” meditation, would it be unreasonable to ask for some disambiguation? What are the key differences between “deep meditation vs. plain old meditation” in your “model”? Or are there more than two types? Are there 20 types? 200 types?
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think this notion of “deep,” or “serious,” or “real” meditation vs. some false, light, or non-serious practice is dubious at best.
Sure, someone may be more likely to experience the benefits of meditation faster if she takes a 10-day retreat compared to 10-days of ten-minute practice. Or maybe not. She might just reject the experience as overwhelming, tedious and painful. Would you agree that someone who consistently runs for 10 minutes, three times a week, is going to realize greater long-term health benefits than someone who only run-walks one marathon a year? Furthermore, telling people that to do it right, physical fitness “requires a huge investment of time and effort” is more likely to discourage anyone from getting up off their ass. I appreciate that you raise awareness of potential risks, but your notion of the time required for “deep” meditation is curiously out of step with what leading meditation instructors advocate.
More importantly, this whole notion of “optimizing returns” is antithetical to the whole practice of meditation! More on this in a moment.
If I cook for only 10 minutes, am I not really “deep cooking”? If I read for 5 minutes, am I only “shallow reading”? How long do I need to exercise before I’m “deep” exercising? Or does this whole idea of “deep vs. shallow” only apply to meditation and not to aerobic sports, weightlifting, or other activities?
“Deep vs shallow (non-deep? light?)” smells like a dumbbell theory—an attempt to explain the world in terms of opposing forces or principles:
Good vs Evil
Conscious vs Unconscious
Intentional vs Unintentional
Thoughts vs Feelings
Enlightenment vs Non-Enlightenment
Self vs No-Self
Whenever I see such a two-part distinction, I try to see if I can separate things into three or four parts instead. If I cannot, then I suspect what we have isn’t two things at all, but two extremes along a single continuum.
Sure, I’ll grant that putting a frozen meal in the microwave barely counts as cooking. But when someone sets aside a specific amount of time to deliberately practice an established Vipassana meditation technique, even if for only 10 minutes, it seems wrong, and pretentious, to discredit that as insufficient and somehow fails to qualify as “real” hardcore meditation.
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers. He’s led meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (est. 1975). Joseph has conducted and produced countless short meditation sessions. Do you take the position that he’s effectively wasting (quite a lot of) people’s time with his “softcore” approach to meditation?
What if, in your quest to “dissolve the algorithm” you only succeed to dumb things down and distill away much of the nuance, subtlety, and non-obvious aspects of meditations effects before you even had a chance to notice some of them? Perhaps it’s too much to hope that when Eastern philosophy encounters Western culture, it could ever result in the Easternization of the West and survive distortion and corruption by Western psychopathologies.
Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It’s one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries—giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.
Now, say someone comes along and says they aren’t happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into “straightforward terms” and come up with a “precise” language to “correctly capture the essentials” and make an “unambiguous model” that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I’m afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You’ll end up with something, but I think you’ll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn’t know what they are missing—like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who’s never heard a performance.
Why stop there! Maybe we can patent the “algorithm” and commodify it as a sort of Mindfulness Porn. Perhaps we could build an “enlightenment machine.” Something akin to one of those Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices for people who want to short circuit a proper weightlifting routine. Who needs sex when you can have an Autoblow 2?
I’m sure I’ll get accused of being anti-science or anti-intellectual for my position here. But I only hope to convey that there are limits to reductionism when it comes to complex, multi-dimensional (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) aspects of human experience. In a similar vein, it’s well-documented that while the reductionist approach has been successful in the early days of molecular biology, unmitigated reductionism underestimates biological complexity and has had an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development.
Your focus on “results” and notions of “return on investment” and gamification of meditation by hacking the “algorithm” is profoundly antithetical to the practice and sounds misguided to me.
Abandon all hope of fruition.
--Atisha, an eleventh century Tibetan meditation teacher.
Pema Chodron calls this one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition, and she says that as long as you wish for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. Pema admitted that she had been unconsciously thinking for decades that she was going to come to a place in the future when she was “really” enlightened. Eventually, she realized that the enlightenment had been happening all along the way, step-by-step, in each moment, and she let go of hoping for some big bang in the future.
The joke in meditation is that we get somewhere by not trying to get anywhere.
“Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. I think this is something that should be celebrated, not discouraged with artificial notions of status or classes of accomplishment.
To be clear, I don’t accuse you of any ill-intentions, and I write this all in good faith. I just wanted to try and raise awareness of some things you might not be considering.
Re: your point that any reductionist explanation is going to be miss a lot: yes, I certainly agree. This is what I was trying to gesture at in the introduction, when I said that this is a non-mystical explanation, not the non-mystical-explanation: because no single explanation can cover everything, and any single framework is going to be insufficient and only cover a particular aspect of the thing.
In fact, a previous version of this article included a section where I mentioned that I expect that reading my articles might be slightly harmful for one’s actual practice of doing meditation… but that I still think it’s worth writing them:
Another strength of the “no explanations, just practice” method is that describing what you should expect to find may by itself lead you astray. On some occasions, I read a description about some meditative insight. I then imagined that “oh, directly experiencing this must feel like X”, and went looking for something that would feel like X. When I did eventually experience the insight, I recognized it from the description but also realized that I had been imagining it entirely wrong. It might have been better if I had never read of it, and just went in blind instead.
… a lot of people seem to take a paint by numbers approach to these practices that then don’t really work for them. The investigation you do into your own experience has to be a real investigation, and not one in which you are highly confident about what there is to find. i.e. people feel like they’re meditating wrong if their experience doesn’t seem to match whichever map they are using. [...]
I do think that this has resulted in ambient memetic immunity of the same type hypothesized by Scott Alexander and others about why new psychotherapy methods work for a while and then seem to stop working. People get some sort of idea of what all these experiences are supposed to be and as a result ignore actual moment to moment sensation. This happened to me with piti (a jhana factor). I realized I had been keeping my eyes to the horizon looking for some sort of special spiritual sensation instead of noticing what was actually happening in my body.
It is very easy to keep thinking about how everything is mental sensations, instead of actually looking at your experience. As I will cover more extensively later, much of insight meditation involves noticing the conflict between what you expect to see, and what you actually see. If you have a strong preconception of what you should see, then this will get in the way of actually seeing what’s there. (There are also other reasons for why having strong expectations can be harmful, which I will cover later on in the article.)
But for all of its benefits, the no-explanation style of explanation has enormous downsides. Most notably, it will completely fail if you have no particular reason to trust the person’s authority: they are telling you to do this thing which they claim to lead to deep insights, while also claiming that it can’t be explained or that it is pointless to explain? Why should you give their words any weight, and how do you know that they are not just peddling a set of practices that will make you go insane rather than giving you any real insight?
“I have this great insight, but I not only can’t explain it to you, but I’m going to spend the balance of my time explaining why you couldn’t understand it if I tried to explain it” sounds awfully close to bulveristic stories like, “If only you weren’t blinded by sin, you too would see the glory of the coming of the lord”.
The no-explanation explanation depends completely on the reader already having trust in meditation being something that is worth doing. In the absence of that trust, it fails completely.
Furthermore, I do think that it is useful to have some idea of what you are looking for. Now, most “just practice, don’t worry about what’s going on” explanations do talk about what you should be paying attention to… but since they do not provide the generator of that advice, you don’t know how and when it should be modified to suit individual circumstances. If you are under the close supervision of a teacher or in standardized circumstances—such as in a monastery—this is not a problem. Outside that traditional setting, it is a problem.
I think that while there is a lot that cannot be explained in straightforward reductionist terms, I find that there is also a lot that can be. And three points with regard to that:
First, as I suggest in the above excerpt, there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space. Life is full of things that one can do, so one quite reasonably asks “if nobody bothers to give a sensible explanation of what’s going on with meditation, isn’t the most likely explanation that it’s just breaking people’s brains and deluding them into thinking that they are having deep insights?” (compare the well-known phenomenon of psychedelics sometimes producing a feeling of deep insight which is totally disconnected from whether one has actually thought of anything insightful).
To take your analogy:
Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It’s one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries—giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.
Now, say someone comes along and says they aren’t happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into “straightforward terms” and come up with a “precise” language to “correctly capture the essentials” and make an “unambiguous model” that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I’m afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You’ll end up with something, but I think you’ll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn’t know what they are missing—like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who’s never heard a performance.
Suppose that somebody has never tried sex, has no idea of what it is about, and is skeptical of whether it is worth trying. They tell me that before they try it, they want me to distill the sexual experience into straightforward terms and come up with a precise language to correctly capture the essentials and make an unambiguous model that they can inspect.
I then try to fulfill their request, doing my best to describe the essence of sex as I understand it, as accurately and straightforwardly as possible. Inevitably, this description ends up leaving out a lot, and only captures those aspects of it that are the easiest to translate into a third-person framework.
But it’s still a correct (albeit incomplete) description, and one that I feel I can stand behind. If they have any questions, I can do my best to answer them in terms of the framework that I have developed for explaining sex. Eventually, they might be satisfied with my explanation and decide that this sex thing does sound interesting and worthwhile enough that they want to give it a try.
So they do, and then they get to discover for themselves all the stuff that I was unable to describe, and the fact that I was unable to give a complete description of those parts doesn’t matter anymore.
Of course, they might also conclude from my description that they now understand sex well enough that it’s not worth their time to even try. And maybe they are wrong about that. Though they might also be right, given their own priorities and values!
Either way, I find it unlikely that withholding the explanation would have made them more likely to try. Probably they would have dismissed it as not worth their time anyway. But if the explanation was good, at least they were in a significantly more informed position to make their decision.
Again, my series is not intended as a way to get people to meditate. But it is intended, in part, to help people make a more informed decision about whether or not meditation seems interesting enough to try.
Second, as I suggested in the post itself, meditation can also loosen your grip on your reality. There is value in just going into the practices without worrying about third-person models, but that also involves a risk of not noticing when you start breaking your brain.
I once heard a meditation teacher say that “you should have external feedback, as well as friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They’re willing to listen to you talk about it because they like you and it’s one of your interests, but if you suddenly start telling them how you’re enlightened, they’ll tell you how you’re full of shit.”
I think that this is a good attitude to have. People who meditate should try to make models of their experience and have non-meditators scrutinize and criticize those models, so as to get external feedback about when they might be veering into dangerous territory, mental health-wise. You can’t really do that if you are only sticking to a first-person perspective, because insanity can seem like complete sanity to the person who is going insane.
If it seems completely impossible to you to describe any of your experience in terms that would make sense to a skeptical scientific reader… well, it might be that it’s just really hard to explain and you don’t know how. It might also be that you are getting increasingly delusional, and you can’t explain it because it’s not coherent enough for there to be anything to explain. Or both—it might be a real thing that you just can’t explain, but because you can’t explain it, you also won’t be able to recognize when the process starts going bad.
Third, regardless of whether these explanations have any effect on whether anyone starts meditating, and regardless of whether it helps any of the people who already meditate… I think that the insights that people have while meditating, suggest fascinating things about how the mind works, which deserve scientific investigation. For example, a better understanding of the mechanisms that create suffering—even from a purely intellectual, third-person perspective—would help figure out how to avoid creating forms of digital sentience that might suffer. A better intellectual understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind no-self may help people make better decisions and understand themselves better. Understanding how craving distorts perception and reasoning may lead to a better scientific understanding of the relevant psychological processes, and so on.
There are lots of discoveries found by people doing insight practices, that current Western psychology hasn’t really incorporated yet, and which I believe Western psychology would significantly benefit from. And it would be a terrible waste if nobody tried to formulate those discoveries in a form that would be conducive to psychology learning from, especially since previous steps taken in this direction have already yielded significant gains [1, 2].
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
The global workspace can only hold a single piece of information at a time. At any given time, multiple different subsystems are trying to send information into the workspace, or otherwise modify its contents.
The exact process by which this happens is not completely understood,
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
According to the Multiple Drafts model, perception is accomplished in the brain by parallel, multi-track processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. These content discriminations produce something like a narrative stream. Probing this stream at different places and times produces different effects and precipitates different narratives. There are many small agents screaming for attention. What we experience is a product of many processes of interpretation.
Frustratingly, Dennett has very little to say about how these content discriminations work and it is unclear what governs the modules.
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.” [...]
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)
Disagree. Zen has a very bad track record while barking heavily up the ‘nothing to do’ tree. In contrast, technique heavy schools get rapid results, in many cases so rapid that there has to be a degree of warning and caution for people with unstable personality constructs. Pre-buddhist non-dual schools also preach a similar doctrine, and it excuses their teachers from needing to demonstrate results. There are stages where surrender and letting go of efforting is essential, but those are techniques/tools to be employed, not the goal of the path. There are discourses that specifically warn against non-efforting prematurely, or villainizing desire in general unfairly which is called out as spiritual bypassing since it excuses you from the hard work of detecting subtle differences between ‘wholesome and unwholesome’ desires.
Pedagogically, yes, a lot of type-a personality Americans do need heavy decompression before things have room to work.
I’m not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.
Here’s a nice comparison on Quora from someone “Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001”
Zen is a school of “sudden enlightenment”. You “just sit” on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly “get” it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and crazy stories of Zen masters.
Vipassana is a school of “gradual enlightenment”. First you learn how to focus on a single object or awareness for extended period of time. Then with non-judgmental awareness you observe. With long enough practice your mental obstructions or “fetters” as Buddhism calls them are broken—one by one. When all the ten fetters are broken, you have reached.
I have tried Zen in a monastery setting and quickly found that its not my cup of tea. People’s temperaments are different. Some people may find Zen to be more appealing than the traditional Vipassana.
I would suggest you try out both a see which works for you. Its one thing to intellectually understand meditation and a totally different thing to sit in a cushion for 8-hours and watch your breath hit the tip of your nostrils.
If you’re going to double-down on the idea of “deep” meditation, would it be unreasonable to ask for some disambiguation? What are the key differences between “deep meditation vs. plain old meditation” in your “model”? Or are there more than two types? Are there 20 types? 200 types?
Well, in my experience, many people (myself included) who get into meditation eventually find it worthwhile to spend significant amounts of time on the practice, on the order of hours a day as well as doing multi-day retreats. There are also teachers who recommend this, as well as research on meditation which suggests that people who have practiced significantly larger amounts get significantly larger effects. My own experience is that 10 minutes per day certainly does something, but much much less than say an hour per day over an extended period, and that an hour per day does less than a multi-day retreat.
I didn’t have any particularly detailed or rigorous distinction between “deep” and “ordinary” meditation in mind, just that what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and for most people deeper insights seem to require significant investments. I agree that this is a continuum rather than a binary distinction, and didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
I certainly agree that there’s a lot to be said for just forgetting about the result-oriented mindset when doing practice, and some of my later posts will be talking about the reasons why that is.
But… well, I didn’t really intend to get into a discussion about measuring outcomes in the first place? The whole section that you reacted to was just there to briefly note that I wanted to set the whole topic to the side and not get into it. You make it sound like I was taking some strong position on what kind of practice is worthwhile, when you are responding to what was one sentence in a 3500-word post, in the context of a paragraph saying that this is a separate topic that I’m not going to get into. As well as my comment which was similarly brief, but acknowledged that it was misleading for me to suggest that a small amount of meditation would be useless.
Now if you want to discuss this in more detail, then I’m certainly willing to do that… but before I go into depth on covering my model, may I respectfully and in good faith suggest that you might to some extent be reacting to what you are projecting on my text, as opposed to what I actually said? :)
(I’ll respond to some of your other points in a separate comment.)
What are the key differences between “deep meditation vs. plain old meditation” in your “model”?
I agree with your request for a definition of the terms used.
Would you agree that someone who consistently runs for 10 minutes, three times a week, is going to realize greater long-term health benefits than someone who only run-walks one marathon a year?
I see no reason to assume a priori that a runner’s training schedule says anything about optimal schedule for meditation.
your notion of the time required for “deep” meditation is curiously out of step with what leading meditation instructors advocate.
How do you select among meditation instructors those that are leading? If it’s their popularity, then clearly their instruction as an aggregate will be biased towards what’s appealing to the mass public, rather than what is effective (whatever the word ‘effective’ might mean in this context).
Or does this whole idea of “deep vs. shallow” only apply to meditation and not to aerobic sports, weightlifting, or other activities?
I don’t know what the OP means by those terms but two related points I want to raise from my own perspective:
as an avid reader and programmer, I definitely experience some of my reading/programming sessions as deep, and some as shallow. I suspect this distinction is valid for all mental activities.
I know of at least one meditative tradition (Theravada) that distinguishes different depths of meditation. Those are called jhanas, there is 4 or 8 of them, depending on the specific school, and the transition into them or between them is a discreet event. They also specify more gradual transition of mental states before entering the first jhana.
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers. He’s led meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (est. 1975). Joseph has conducted and produced countless short meditation sessions. Do you take the position that he’s effectively wasting (quite a lot of) people’s time with his “softcore” approach to meditation?
I’m not an OP but I do suspect that an individual who fits this bio would be wasting a lot of time for a lot of people. Or rather, provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide. Can’t speak specifically about Mr. Goldstein because I don’t know how accurate this bio is.
Perhaps we could build an “enlightenment machine.”
That’s an interesting point that I’ve thought about many times. If the supposed benefits of meditation were available without all the sacrifices, for example by taking a pill, I wonder how many meditators would decide to do that.
Something akin to one of those Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices for people who want to short circuit a proper weightlifting routine. Who needs sex when you can have an Autoblow 2?
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that. Otherwise, it would be great if you can clarify this part for me.
Your focus on “results” and notions of “return on investment” and gamification of meditation by hacking the “algorithm” is profoundly antithetical to the practice
There are certainly some schools of meditation that criticise focusing on the outcome. But those are not the only ones, right?
“Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. I think this is something that should be celebrated
Why should it? Having looked through the studies on the supposed benefits of meditation (quite thoroughly, although a few years ago), I believe this is mostly a waste of time. Although I think it’s harmless because that time would otherwise be wasted in some other way.
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that.
I thought that was probably not a choice for most people. Perhaps a result of society getting so obese that no one finds each other attractive anymore? For me, it’s like the difference between riding (preferably racing) a motorcycle vs playing a motorcycle video game. I can’t imagine why anyone who has experienced the former would prefer the latter.
...provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide
What makes you call meditation a religious program?
Where is the religion in this practice:
Practice: Mindfulness of Breathing
Find a quiet place, and sit on either a chair or cushion. Choose a chair with a firm, flat seat, and hold your back upright (although not stiffly so). Let the soles of your feet meet the ground, and bring your hands on to your lap. If you sit on a cushion, you can be cross-legged. Let your body be untensed, inviting openness and confidence.
Decide how long to practice for. Your session can be as short as five minutes, or longer. You may find it useful to set an alarm to tell you when to stop, so you don’t have to think about it.
Bring attention to the sensations of breath in your belly. Let go of thinking about or analyzing the breath. Just feel it. Follow its natural rhythms gently with attention: in and out, rising and falling. Let thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and sounds be as they are—you don’t need to follow them or push them away. Just allow them to happen, without interference, as you direct gentle attention to the breath.
When you notice that your mind has wandered, as it likely will often, acknowledge that this has happened, with kindness. Remember, as soon as you’re aware of the wandering, bring your attention back to the breath, and continue to follow it, in and out, moment by moment, with friendly interest.
Continue with steps three and four until it’s time to stop.
===
Clearly you have some interest since you’re here reading and responding to a rather long series of articles on meditation. But it seems you may also harbor a lot of misunderstandings. What’s meditation in your mind? And why are you convinced it’s “a waste of time” when hundreds of millions of people are doing it?
Out of curiosity, is there anything that might change your mind? Scientific papers? Meta-analysis studies? Perhaps testimonials of people’s positive experience? Hundreds of testimonials? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or is your decision based on some kind of dogma, moral principle, or fear?
I’m not particularly trying to change your mind, I’m just wondering how someone here on a “rationalist”-themed site ended up so blinded by their biases.
I wrote up something on a meditation technique I used as a freediver.
is there anything that might change your mind? Scientific papers? Meta-analysis studies?
Yes, studies with good methodologies and decent sample sizes would make me question my stance. If they were replicated, that would completely change my mind. As I mentioned in my other comments, I have arrived at my present beliefs by doing a literature review few years ago.
I’m a bit more sceptical about meta-analyses since a lot of papers published on the subject are of terribly low quality (or at least were, when I looked into it).
If you’re going to double-down on the idea of “deep” meditation, would it be unreasonable to ask for some disambiguation? What are the key differences between “deep meditation vs. plain old meditation” in your “model”? Or are there more than two types? Are there 20 types? 200 types?
I don’t mean to be pedantic, but I think this notion of “deep,” or “serious,” or “real” meditation vs. some false, light, or non-serious practice is dubious at best.
Sure, someone may be more likely to experience the benefits of meditation faster if she takes a 10-day retreat compared to 10-days of ten-minute practice. Or maybe not. She might just reject the experience as overwhelming, tedious and painful. Would you agree that someone who consistently runs for 10 minutes, three times a week, is going to realize greater long-term health benefits than someone who only run-walks one marathon a year? Furthermore, telling people that to do it right, physical fitness “requires a huge investment of time and effort” is more likely to discourage anyone from getting up off their ass. I appreciate that you raise awareness of potential risks, but your notion of the time required for “deep” meditation is curiously out of step with what leading meditation instructors advocate.
More importantly, this whole notion of “optimizing returns” is antithetical to the whole practice of meditation! More on this in a moment.
If I cook for only 10 minutes, am I not really “deep cooking”? If I read for 5 minutes, am I only “shallow reading”? How long do I need to exercise before I’m “deep” exercising? Or does this whole idea of “deep vs. shallow” only apply to meditation and not to aerobic sports, weightlifting, or other activities?
“Deep vs shallow (non-deep? light?)” smells like a dumbbell theory—an attempt to explain the world in terms of opposing forces or principles:
Good vs Evil
Conscious vs Unconscious
Intentional vs Unintentional
Thoughts vs Feelings
Enlightenment vs Non-Enlightenment
Self vs No-Self
Whenever I see such a two-part distinction, I try to see if I can separate things into three or four parts instead. If I cannot, then I suspect what we have isn’t two things at all, but two extremes along a single continuum.
Sure, I’ll grant that putting a frozen meal in the microwave barely counts as cooking. But when someone sets aside a specific amount of time to deliberately practice an established Vipassana meditation technique, even if for only 10 minutes, it seems wrong, and pretentious, to discredit that as insufficient and somehow fails to qualify as “real” hardcore meditation.
Joseph Goldstein is one of the first American vipassana teachers. He’s led meditation retreats worldwide since 1974. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (est. 1975). Joseph has conducted and produced countless short meditation sessions. Do you take the position that he’s effectively wasting (quite a lot of) people’s time with his “softcore” approach to meditation?
What if, in your quest to “dissolve the algorithm” you only succeed to dumb things down and distill away much of the nuance, subtlety, and non-obvious aspects of meditations effects before you even had a chance to notice some of them? Perhaps it’s too much to hope that when Eastern philosophy encounters Western culture, it could ever result in the Easternization of the West and survive distortion and corruption by Western psychopathologies.
Imagine for a moment if we were talking about sex instead of meditation. Sex encompasses a pretty complex, wide-ranging set of experiences. It arouses intense physical and emotional responses. It’s one of the most intimate experiences one can have with another person. It encompasses the ego dissolution of orgasm, the removal of barriers toward bonding with another person more closely, elements of risk and danger, vulnerability, a playful exploration of sensations and personal boundaries—giving and taking, connecting and disconnecting, tension and dissolution. And it can result in long-lasting physical, emotional, and cathartic benefits.
Now, say someone comes along and says they aren’t happy with these loosely vague, poetic, romantic notions. They want to distill the sexual experience into “straightforward terms” and come up with a “precise” language to “correctly capture the essentials” and make an “unambiguous model” that any educated person would understand. Sorry, but I’m afraid to succeed in that endeavor is to fail. You’ll end up with something, but I think you’ll be leaving a lot out. It might even satisfy someone who has never had sex and therefore doesn’t know what they are missing—like using a diagram to describe a J. S. Bach two-part Invention to someone who’s never heard a performance.
Why stop there! Maybe we can patent the “algorithm” and commodify it as a sort of Mindfulness Porn. Perhaps we could build an “enlightenment machine.” Something akin to one of those Electrical Muscle Stimulation devices for people who want to short circuit a proper weightlifting routine. Who needs sex when you can have an Autoblow 2?
I’m sure I’ll get accused of being anti-science or anti-intellectual for my position here. But I only hope to convey that there are limits to reductionism when it comes to complex, multi-dimensional (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) aspects of human experience. In a similar vein, it’s well-documented that while the reductionist approach has been successful in the early days of molecular biology, unmitigated reductionism underestimates biological complexity and has had an increasingly detrimental influence on many areas of biomedical research, including drug discovery and vaccine development.
Your focus on “results” and notions of “return on investment” and gamification of meditation by hacking the “algorithm” is profoundly antithetical to the practice and sounds misguided to me.
Pema Chodron calls this one of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition, and she says that as long as you wish for things to change, they never will. As long as you’re wanting yourself to get better, you won’t. As long as you have an orientation toward the future, you can never just relax into what you already have or already are. Pema admitted that she had been unconsciously thinking for decades that she was going to come to a place in the future when she was “really” enlightened. Eventually, she realized that the enlightenment had been happening all along the way, step-by-step, in each moment, and she let go of hoping for some big bang in the future.
The joke in meditation is that we get somewhere by not trying to get anywhere.
“Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. I think this is something that should be celebrated, not discouraged with artificial notions of status or classes of accomplishment.
To be clear, I don’t accuse you of any ill-intentions, and I write this all in good faith. I just wanted to try and raise awareness of some things you might not be considering.
Cheers!
Re: your point that any reductionist explanation is going to be miss a lot: yes, I certainly agree. This is what I was trying to gesture at in the introduction, when I said that this is a non-mystical explanation, not the non-mystical-explanation: because no single explanation can cover everything, and any single framework is going to be insufficient and only cover a particular aspect of the thing.
In fact, a previous version of this article included a section where I mentioned that I expect that reading my articles might be slightly harmful for one’s actual practice of doing meditation… but that I still think it’s worth writing them:
I think that while there is a lot that cannot be explained in straightforward reductionist terms, I find that there is also a lot that can be. And three points with regard to that:
First, as I suggest in the above excerpt, there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space. Life is full of things that one can do, so one quite reasonably asks “if nobody bothers to give a sensible explanation of what’s going on with meditation, isn’t the most likely explanation that it’s just breaking people’s brains and deluding them into thinking that they are having deep insights?” (compare the well-known phenomenon of psychedelics sometimes producing a feeling of deep insight which is totally disconnected from whether one has actually thought of anything insightful).
To take your analogy:
Suppose that somebody has never tried sex, has no idea of what it is about, and is skeptical of whether it is worth trying. They tell me that before they try it, they want me to distill the sexual experience into straightforward terms and come up with a precise language to correctly capture the essentials and make an unambiguous model that they can inspect.
I then try to fulfill their request, doing my best to describe the essence of sex as I understand it, as accurately and straightforwardly as possible. Inevitably, this description ends up leaving out a lot, and only captures those aspects of it that are the easiest to translate into a third-person framework.
But it’s still a correct (albeit incomplete) description, and one that I feel I can stand behind. If they have any questions, I can do my best to answer them in terms of the framework that I have developed for explaining sex. Eventually, they might be satisfied with my explanation and decide that this sex thing does sound interesting and worthwhile enough that they want to give it a try.
So they do, and then they get to discover for themselves all the stuff that I was unable to describe, and the fact that I was unable to give a complete description of those parts doesn’t matter anymore.
Of course, they might also conclude from my description that they now understand sex well enough that it’s not worth their time to even try. And maybe they are wrong about that. Though they might also be right, given their own priorities and values!
Either way, I find it unlikely that withholding the explanation would have made them more likely to try. Probably they would have dismissed it as not worth their time anyway. But if the explanation was good, at least they were in a significantly more informed position to make their decision.
Again, my series is not intended as a way to get people to meditate. But it is intended, in part, to help people make a more informed decision about whether or not meditation seems interesting enough to try.
Second, as I suggested in the post itself, meditation can also loosen your grip on your reality. There is value in just going into the practices without worrying about third-person models, but that also involves a risk of not noticing when you start breaking your brain.
I once heard a meditation teacher say that “you should have external feedback, as well as friends who think that Buddhism is stupid. They’re willing to listen to you talk about it because they like you and it’s one of your interests, but if you suddenly start telling them how you’re enlightened, they’ll tell you how you’re full of shit.”
I think that this is a good attitude to have. People who meditate should try to make models of their experience and have non-meditators scrutinize and criticize those models, so as to get external feedback about when they might be veering into dangerous territory, mental health-wise. You can’t really do that if you are only sticking to a first-person perspective, because insanity can seem like complete sanity to the person who is going insane.
If it seems completely impossible to you to describe any of your experience in terms that would make sense to a skeptical scientific reader… well, it might be that it’s just really hard to explain and you don’t know how. It might also be that you are getting increasingly delusional, and you can’t explain it because it’s not coherent enough for there to be anything to explain. Or both—it might be a real thing that you just can’t explain, but because you can’t explain it, you also won’t be able to recognize when the process starts going bad.
Third, regardless of whether these explanations have any effect on whether anyone starts meditating, and regardless of whether it helps any of the people who already meditate… I think that the insights that people have while meditating, suggest fascinating things about how the mind works, which deserve scientific investigation. For example, a better understanding of the mechanisms that create suffering—even from a purely intellectual, third-person perspective—would help figure out how to avoid creating forms of digital sentience that might suffer. A better intellectual understanding of the psychological mechanisms behind no-self may help people make better decisions and understand themselves better. Understanding how craving distorts perception and reasoning may lead to a better scientific understanding of the relevant psychological processes, and so on.
There are lots of discoveries found by people doing insight practices, that current Western psychology hasn’t really incorporated yet, and which I believe Western psychology would significantly benefit from. And it would be a terrible waste if nobody tried to formulate those discoveries in a form that would be conducive to psychology learning from, especially since previous steps taken in this direction have already yielded significant gains [1, 2].
>there are a lot of people on Less Wrong in particular are—for good reason—skeptical about whether or not there is actually anything worthwhile going on in this space.
if the goal is, in part, to get more people to try meditation, you could also 1) cite the scientific literature on the benefits, 2) maybe encourage them to try (if only for 10 minutes a day, but should be for at least 6-8 weeks in my opinion), 3) compile personal testimonials about the benefits (and perhaps your own story).
A lot has been written about the basic idea. I imagine the type of people who are most interested in a more academic “model” are probably the type who would be more inclined to debate the “ontological problems” with your “pedagogical assumptions” and your “lexical fallacies” blah blah lol You know the types. Arguments, I’ve found, rarely shift intuitions.
I think some simple metaphors are probably even more effective than a complex model of the mind that people are going to have many reasons to disagree with. This 60-second video gets the point across without so many fancy words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxyVCjp48S4
No credit to Marvin Minsky for your model? He pioneered the multi-agent model in his 1986 book “Society of Mind.”
http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/som-1.html
That sounds lifted wholly from Dennett’s work. The similarities are striking:
Basically you’ve constructed a dumbed down version with a Cartesian Theater. One of Dennett’s aims is to get rid of this notion of a centralized place of processing in the brain in order to escape Cartesian materialism. For him, there is no single brain area in which it all comes together. With this decentralized notion of consciousness, there is no need for a Theater and no need for a homunculus to live inside our brains. Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of consciousness must first be understood as an alternative for Cartesian materialism.
So far it seem highly problematic and appallingly inauthentic.
I recommend Minsky’s “The Emotion Machine.” He offers a much more compelling notion of how things like recent memories, serial processes, symbolic descriptions, and self-models conspire to create an illusion of immanence.
But nothing beats the Monkey Mind analogy in terms of bang for your buck!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6pMbRiSBPs
“My” model is not meant to suggest that everything is unique to me; it meant “the particular way I have been putting the different pieces together”. I did not credit all the sources that have contributed to my synthesis because I linked to the earlier posts which do credit their sources more. I reference Minsky in one of the posts; as for the global workspace model, it is not so much lifted from Dennett but rather pretty much wholly lifted from Stanislas Dehaene’s work, as one of the linked posts should hopefully make obvious. Both Dehaene and Dennett got the original idea from Bernard Baars, whose theory they cite. I will also be referencing Dennett in a later post in this series.
(I liked Dennett’s book, as you might guess from my reference to heterophenomenology, but also found it to have aged somewhat badly—he started out with lots of arguments for why one couldn’t experimentally show a centralized location of consciousness even in principle, but these were not very compelling arguments after I’d first read Dehaene who had done exactly that and discussed his experimental setups in detail.)
Disagree. Zen has a very bad track record while barking heavily up the ‘nothing to do’ tree. In contrast, technique heavy schools get rapid results, in many cases so rapid that there has to be a degree of warning and caution for people with unstable personality constructs. Pre-buddhist non-dual schools also preach a similar doctrine, and it excuses their teachers from needing to demonstrate results. There are stages where surrender and letting go of efforting is essential, but those are techniques/tools to be employed, not the goal of the path. There are discourses that specifically warn against non-efforting prematurely, or villainizing desire in general unfairly which is called out as spiritual bypassing since it excuses you from the hard work of detecting subtle differences between ‘wholesome and unwholesome’ desires.
Pedagogically, yes, a lot of type-a personality Americans do need heavy decompression before things have room to work.
I’m not sure exactly what you disagree about, but thanks for the comparisons.
Here’s a nice comparison on Quora from someone “Practicing Yoga & Meditation since 2001”
Zen is a school of “sudden enlightenment”. You “just sit” on the cushion for a million years and with shear mind force destroy your ego and then you suddenly “get” it. Or (in the Rinzai school) you are given an absurd puzzle called Koan to solve. It throws your ego from its normal course that you reach Satori. Hence all the strange and crazy stories of Zen masters.
Vipassana is a school of “gradual enlightenment”. First you learn how to focus on a single object or awareness for extended period of time. Then with non-judgmental awareness you observe. With long enough practice your mental obstructions or “fetters” as Buddhism calls them are broken—one by one. When all the ten fetters are broken, you have reached.
I have tried Zen in a monastery setting and quickly found that its not my cup of tea. People’s temperaments are different. Some people may find Zen to be more appealing than the traditional Vipassana.
I would suggest you try out both a see which works for you. Its one thing to intellectually understand meditation and a totally different thing to sit in a cushion for 8-hours and watch your breath hit the tip of your nostrils.
Well, in my experience, many people (myself included) who get into meditation eventually find it worthwhile to spend significant amounts of time on the practice, on the order of hours a day as well as doing multi-day retreats. There are also teachers who recommend this, as well as research on meditation which suggests that people who have practiced significantly larger amounts get significantly larger effects. My own experience is that 10 minutes per day certainly does something, but much much less than say an hour per day over an extended period, and that an hour per day does less than a multi-day retreat.
I didn’t have any particularly detailed or rigorous distinction between “deep” and “ordinary” meditation in mind, just that what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and for most people deeper insights seem to require significant investments. I agree that this is a continuum rather than a binary distinction, and didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
I certainly agree that there’s a lot to be said for just forgetting about the result-oriented mindset when doing practice, and some of my later posts will be talking about the reasons why that is.
But… well, I didn’t really intend to get into a discussion about measuring outcomes in the first place? The whole section that you reacted to was just there to briefly note that I wanted to set the whole topic to the side and not get into it. You make it sound like I was taking some strong position on what kind of practice is worthwhile, when you are responding to what was one sentence in a 3500-word post, in the context of a paragraph saying that this is a separate topic that I’m not going to get into. As well as my comment which was similarly brief, but acknowledged that it was misleading for me to suggest that a small amount of meditation would be useless.
Now if you want to discuss this in more detail, then I’m certainly willing to do that… but before I go into depth on covering my model, may I respectfully and in good faith suggest that you might to some extent be reacting to what you are projecting on my text, as opposed to what I actually said? :)
(I’ll respond to some of your other points in a separate comment.)
I agree with your request for a definition of the terms used.
I see no reason to assume a priori that a runner’s training schedule says anything about optimal schedule for meditation.
How do you select among meditation instructors those that are leading? If it’s their popularity, then clearly their instruction as an aggregate will be biased towards what’s appealing to the mass public, rather than what is effective (whatever the word ‘effective’ might mean in this context).
I don’t know what the OP means by those terms but two related points I want to raise from my own perspective:
as an avid reader and programmer, I definitely experience some of my reading/programming sessions as deep, and some as shallow. I suspect this distinction is valid for all mental activities.
I know of at least one meditative tradition (Theravada) that distinguishes different depths of meditation. Those are called jhanas, there is 4 or 8 of them, depending on the specific school, and the transition into them or between them is a discreet event. They also specify more gradual transition of mental states before entering the first jhana.
I’m not an OP but I do suspect that an individual who fits this bio would be wasting a lot of time for a lot of people. Or rather, provides no more benefit than any other religious program would provide. Can’t speak specifically about Mr. Goldstein because I don’t know how accurate this bio is.
That’s an interesting point that I’ve thought about many times. If the supposed benefits of meditation were available without all the sacrifices, for example by taking a pill, I wonder how many meditators would decide to do that.
Many people are in fact choosing to not have sex with humans, instead simulating interaction with a human while self-stimulating. If your criticism here is based on an assumption that such choice is somehow invalid or worse, it would be great if you could support that. Otherwise, it would be great if you can clarify this part for me.
There are certainly some schools of meditation that criticise focusing on the outcome. But those are not the only ones, right?
Why should it? Having looked through the studies on the supposed benefits of meditation (quite thoroughly, although a few years ago), I believe this is mostly a waste of time. Although I think it’s harmless because that time would otherwise be wasted in some other way.
I thought that was probably not a choice for most people. Perhaps a result of society getting so obese that no one finds each other attractive anymore? For me, it’s like the difference between riding (preferably racing) a motorcycle vs playing a motorcycle video game. I can’t imagine why anyone who has experienced the former would prefer the latter.
The OP conceded my points were valid btw, but thanks for weighing in with your profound personal insights!
> I believe this is mostly a waste of time.
oh well!
What makes you call meditation a religious program?
Where is the religion in this practice:
Practice: Mindfulness of Breathing
Find a quiet place, and sit on either a chair or cushion. Choose a chair with a firm, flat seat, and hold your back upright (although not stiffly so). Let the soles of your feet meet the ground, and bring your hands on to your lap. If you sit on a cushion, you can be cross-legged. Let your body be untensed, inviting openness and confidence.
Decide how long to practice for. Your session can be as short as five minutes, or longer. You may find it useful to set an alarm to tell you when to stop, so you don’t have to think about it.
Bring attention to the sensations of breath in your belly. Let go of thinking about or analyzing the breath. Just feel it. Follow its natural rhythms gently with attention: in and out, rising and falling. Let thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and sounds be as they are—you don’t need to follow them or push them away. Just allow them to happen, without interference, as you direct gentle attention to the breath.
When you notice that your mind has wandered, as it likely will often, acknowledge that this has happened, with kindness. Remember, as soon as you’re aware of the wandering, bring your attention back to the breath, and continue to follow it, in and out, moment by moment, with friendly interest.
Continue with steps three and four until it’s time to stop.
===
Clearly you have some interest since you’re here reading and responding to a rather long series of articles on meditation. But it seems you may also harbor a lot of misunderstandings. What’s meditation in your mind? And why are you convinced it’s “a waste of time” when hundreds of millions of people are doing it?
Out of curiosity, is there anything that might change your mind? Scientific papers? Meta-analysis studies? Perhaps testimonials of people’s positive experience? Hundreds of testimonials? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Or is your decision based on some kind of dogma, moral principle, or fear?
I’m not particularly trying to change your mind, I’m just wondering how someone here on a “rationalist”-themed site ended up so blinded by their biases.
I wrote up something on a meditation technique I used as a freediver.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ieMQHkLuYXND8Yohn/meditation-skill-surfing-the-urge
Maybe it’ll give you a new perspective; if not, I’d be happy to understand what makes this a “religious program.”
Yes, studies with good methodologies and decent sample sizes would make me question my stance. If they were replicated, that would completely change my mind. As I mentioned in my other comments, I have arrived at my present beliefs by doing a literature review few years ago.
I’m a bit more sceptical about meta-analyses since a lot of papers published on the subject are of terribly low quality (or at least were, when I looked into it).