Looking at the highest upvoted comment in this debate:
I started meditation with great skepticism in order to calm myself down, which is what the studies showed that it was good for… and then weird shit started happening exactly like the books said it would. Vibrating sensations started happening exactly like the books said they would, I started gaining on-demand access to states of immense happiness, joy and contentment (jhanas), and I started having the exact insights that were predicted.
Seems to describe “meditation” as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.
A list of specific techniques and claims of specific Buddhist schools, together with notes like “this seems correct” and “this seems wrong”, would be a huge step towards skepticism. I don’t remember seeing anything like that on LW. Also, maybe it’s just my memory, but I don’t remember any negative statement like “meditation cannot produce result X”.
Seems to describe “meditation” as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.
This is precisely what I find weird about this. When I first studied Zen, the book I read listed four different basic techniques, and that’s just Zen! (A lot of early meditation studies were also on TM, which is mantra-based. I think modern studies of meditation, however, are now more focused on “mindfulness” rather than meditation per se, and that mindfulness may in fact be more precisely defined than “meditation” in its full generality, since there are meditation practices aimed at other things—such as compassion, for example.)
A long time ago I read about an EEG study of the effects of different meditation on the meditator’s response to unexpected stimuli, and remember how one type of meditation made people’s EEG not show any response, and another had them appear to briefly notice the sound and then return to the meditative state, vs. how an non-experienced meditator’s brain would stay active and have difficulty settling back down after an interrupting sound.
That seems to suggest that different meditative practices have differing long-term effects, but since I don’t recall any details of the study I can’t really say more on that point. (In particular I’m wondering about sample sizes—I don’t think they were large.)
FWIW, Zen masters also generally suggest different meditation techniques depending on whether you just want to improve your concentration (or other secular/individual benefits) vs. doing it for religious reasons or to attain enlightenment.
That being said, I did the secular-recommended kind (counting breaths) for a while when I was younger and nonetheless experienced some altered states, as well as some increased confidence or centeredness or… not really sure how to describe it. One of the altered states was a weird sense of compassion for everything in my apartment, such that I felt sorry for the dirty dishes and so I cleaned them. That only happened once, though. The other kind of altered state was the sense that everything was alright in the world and that I was a part of it. That happened a couple of times.
Anyway, I think it’s hard to argue that meditation of almost any sort can’t induce altered states. The question is more which states and whether they’re good or bad for you. Zen literature basically says to ignore them either way, even if they make you feel like you could fly or have psychic superpowers, or conversely if they make you think you’re being attacked by demons. This seems to imply there’s a pretty good chance of unpleasant altered states if you stick with it long enough, and it’s also implied in a lot of meditation literature that if you keep going then the positive and negative hallucinations will stop and things get better generally, but I never meditated long enough to get either kind of hallucination, unless you count feeling part of everything or compassionate for everything as a hallucination rather than an attitude adjustment. ;-)
I tried Silva method when I was a teenager. I learned to relax, in a way that is somehow different on EEG from normal relaxation (not sure how, I was not the one looking at the display). Sadly, the promised supernatural abilities did not manifest.
Then I tried the kind of meditation when you count the breath and try to not-do the internal monologue. And I learned how to turn off the internal monologue. An interesting thing, to learn a new mental move, but that’s it.
So, I believe that if you keep doing any kind of meditation long enough, you will have some kind of experience. Yes, probably different kinds for different types of meditation. My question is, whether it is worth the time spent, compared to other things you could be doing instead, which would also give you some kind of experience. (In other words, why are we privileging meditation as the thing to do, other than mere personal preference.) Also, there seems to be an assumption that huge amounts of time spent meditating will bring some huge effects, while I would expect diminishing returns. (So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards the actually awesome things.)
I assume that playing chess a lot rewires some parts of your brain. Driving a car a lot probably does the same, or playing a musical instrument a lot. In this context, the statement that meditating a lot rewires some parts of your brain doesn’t feel particularly shocking. Yes, lots of meditation practice makes you better at meditation. So what? Some people say it makes you feel less pain. Nice if true.
Sure. I have not seriously taken up meditation again since that time, because although the centered-and-confident stuff was really nice, it took a long time to get to that point, and it wasn’t a superpower level of centered or confident.
So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards the actually awesome things
Actually, my experience has been that dropping meditation is like dropping exercise: the benefits go away after a while. (It might not be 100% true as I think there might be some lasting benefit to having learned how much nonsense my brain generates from an experience perspective vs. just knowing it in the abstract. But I’d be hard-pressed to tell if that’s true, as I don’t have a control group for myself. ;-) )
Then I tried the kind of meditation when you count the breath and try to not-do the internal monologue. And I learned how to turn off the internal monologue. An interesting thing, to learn a new mental move, but that’s it.
How odd. I never learned to reliably turn off internal monologue during meditation, let alone everyday life. How long did that take you?
To be clear, I often experienced cessation of internal speech during meditation, but not because of any ability to do so on purpose. It just happened sometimes, in the same way my centeredness just started happening and hung around until a while after I stopped meditating regularly.
My own metaphor for meditation is that it’s like the mental equivalent of physical exercise: I get general mental health benefits from a regular practice, but motivation for it is often difficult because the benefits take time to show up and are subtle at first. And dropping out of the habit is easy because the benefits linger a while after you stop.
if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get
Yeah, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me since I didn’t get any of those things as independent skills from meditating. Rather, I got them in the same way that physical exercise helps people relax or have pleasant feelings if they do enough of it. Nowadays I mix my meditation and physical exercise by doing Tai Chi so I can be more time-efficient. ;-)
(Well, not really, tai chi moves are often meditative in feel, but I haven’t been doing actual on-purpose meditation during it. But that might actually be an effect booster, so now I’m tempted to actually try it.)
How odd. I never learned to reliably turn off internal monologue during meditation, let alone everyday life. How long did that take you?
Hard to say, because before that I didn’t meditate systematically. I gave it a few tries, then forgot about the entire thing for years, then tried again. (Also, not sure whether I should include the time spent doing Silva method as not the same thing, but still about mind control.) Something between a month and a year since I started seriously trying to achieve this specific outcome.
The technique was counting your breath until you notice that you are distracted by internal monologue, then start again from 1. (My rule of thumb was that “distracted” means either that I am not 100% sure which number follows, or that I keep a certain topic of internal monologue longer than during one breath.) The first few attempts felt insanely impossible, like: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “oh my god I am so awesome I am finally doing this correctly… oh shit”, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “great, doing this again, this time I shouldn’t start talking to myself… fuck, I just did”, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “yes, just don’t ruin it again by… eh, doing exactly this, again”, 1, 1, 1,… It felt impossible to not make a meta comment on either my recent progress or the lack thereof. Plus the frequent unrelated thoughts, of course.
Then at some moment, I was travelling by a bus somewhere, and I was like: “I will keep doing this until the bus gets to my destination, regardless of whether it works or not.” I guess that achieved the paradoxical conditions of trying hard to do something while kinda being outcome independent. It started getting better, then I made a mistake, but I didn’t care and just started again without a strong emotional reaction, and the time intervals between mistakes became longer and longer. And it didn’t even feel like I was trying hard. Just, doing it, with greater or lesser success. And then, in addition to short internal monologues shorter than one breath, there were also moments with no monologue.
Afterwards, I already had the experience of what it feels like to be internally silent, so I can just try to go directly to that state. It kinda feels like holding my breath, except I am not, but it feels like a muscle tension at the back of my palate. It only lasts as long as I am aware that I am doing this. From certain perspective, it’s like I have replaced the verbal monologue by a non-verbal stop signal. (So I guess the next level of meditation would be to notice all these non-verbal self-signals and somehow stop doing them, too.) This was also more difficult and felt more forceful at the beginning, then got easier.
You probably know the book Don’t Shoot the Dog. I found it helpful at understanding what is happening; specifically that you are not supposed to punish yourself for failing… but also not supposed to meta-punish yourself for accidentally punishing yourself, etc. I suspect that before doing any awareness meditation, one is supposed to do lots of loving-kindness meditation, exactly for the purpose of getting the self-reinforcement mechanism right. No punishment whatsoever on any level at any step of meditation. Because ultimately, punishing yourself for doing X is inevitably connected with punishing yourself for noticing that you did X, which goes against the goal of noticing it all.
I think I could stop the internal monologue at any moment I want, but without it I am unable to do some things, for example to write text. My ability to read text is also impaired; I can read individual words, but I do not understand the meaning of the sentence. But I can e.g. walk.
Looking at the highest upvoted comment in this debate:
Seems to describe “meditation” as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.
A list of specific techniques and claims of specific Buddhist schools, together with notes like “this seems correct” and “this seems wrong”, would be a huge step towards skepticism. I don’t remember seeing anything like that on LW. Also, maybe it’s just my memory, but I don’t remember any negative statement like “meditation cannot produce result X”.
This is precisely what I find weird about this. When I first studied Zen, the book I read listed four different basic techniques, and that’s just Zen! (A lot of early meditation studies were also on TM, which is mantra-based. I think modern studies of meditation, however, are now more focused on “mindfulness” rather than meditation per se, and that mindfulness may in fact be more precisely defined than “meditation” in its full generality, since there are meditation practices aimed at other things—such as compassion, for example.)
A long time ago I read about an EEG study of the effects of different meditation on the meditator’s response to unexpected stimuli, and remember how one type of meditation made people’s EEG not show any response, and another had them appear to briefly notice the sound and then return to the meditative state, vs. how an non-experienced meditator’s brain would stay active and have difficulty settling back down after an interrupting sound.
That seems to suggest that different meditative practices have differing long-term effects, but since I don’t recall any details of the study I can’t really say more on that point. (In particular I’m wondering about sample sizes—I don’t think they were large.)
FWIW, Zen masters also generally suggest different meditation techniques depending on whether you just want to improve your concentration (or other secular/individual benefits) vs. doing it for religious reasons or to attain enlightenment.
That being said, I did the secular-recommended kind (counting breaths) for a while when I was younger and nonetheless experienced some altered states, as well as some increased confidence or centeredness or… not really sure how to describe it. One of the altered states was a weird sense of compassion for everything in my apartment, such that I felt sorry for the dirty dishes and so I cleaned them. That only happened once, though. The other kind of altered state was the sense that everything was alright in the world and that I was a part of it. That happened a couple of times.
Anyway, I think it’s hard to argue that meditation of almost any sort can’t induce altered states. The question is more which states and whether they’re good or bad for you. Zen literature basically says to ignore them either way, even if they make you feel like you could fly or have psychic superpowers, or conversely if they make you think you’re being attacked by demons. This seems to imply there’s a pretty good chance of unpleasant altered states if you stick with it long enough, and it’s also implied in a lot of meditation literature that if you keep going then the positive and negative hallucinations will stop and things get better generally, but I never meditated long enough to get either kind of hallucination, unless you count feeling part of everything or compassionate for everything as a hallucination rather than an attitude adjustment. ;-)
I tried Silva method when I was a teenager. I learned to relax, in a way that is somehow different on EEG from normal relaxation (not sure how, I was not the one looking at the display). Sadly, the promised supernatural abilities did not manifest.
Then I tried the kind of meditation when you count the breath and try to not-do the internal monologue. And I learned how to turn off the internal monologue. An interesting thing, to learn a new mental move, but that’s it.
So, I believe that if you keep doing any kind of meditation long enough, you will have some kind of experience. Yes, probably different kinds for different types of meditation. My question is, whether it is worth the time spent, compared to other things you could be doing instead, which would also give you some kind of experience. (In other words, why are we privileging meditation as the thing to do, other than mere personal preference.) Also, there seems to be an assumption that huge amounts of time spent meditating will bring some huge effects, while I would expect diminishing returns. (So if you already can relax, stop your internal monologue, and generate some pleasant feelings, does it make sense to stop because you already got most of what you can get, or does it make sense to continue because it shows that you are already on 10% of the way towards the actually awesome things.)
I assume that playing chess a lot rewires some parts of your brain. Driving a car a lot probably does the same, or playing a musical instrument a lot. In this context, the statement that meditating a lot rewires some parts of your brain doesn’t feel particularly shocking. Yes, lots of meditation practice makes you better at meditation. So what? Some people say it makes you feel less pain. Nice if true.
So it’s kinda like a hobby, from my perspective.
Sure. I have not seriously taken up meditation again since that time, because although the centered-and-confident stuff was really nice, it took a long time to get to that point, and it wasn’t a superpower level of centered or confident.
Actually, my experience has been that dropping meditation is like dropping exercise: the benefits go away after a while. (It might not be 100% true as I think there might be some lasting benefit to having learned how much nonsense my brain generates from an experience perspective vs. just knowing it in the abstract. But I’d be hard-pressed to tell if that’s true, as I don’t have a control group for myself. ;-) )
How odd. I never learned to reliably turn off internal monologue during meditation, let alone everyday life. How long did that take you?
To be clear, I often experienced cessation of internal speech during meditation, but not because of any ability to do so on purpose. It just happened sometimes, in the same way my centeredness just started happening and hung around until a while after I stopped meditating regularly.
My own metaphor for meditation is that it’s like the mental equivalent of physical exercise: I get general mental health benefits from a regular practice, but motivation for it is often difficult because the benefits take time to show up and are subtle at first. And dropping out of the habit is easy because the benefits linger a while after you stop.
Yeah, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me since I didn’t get any of those things as independent skills from meditating. Rather, I got them in the same way that physical exercise helps people relax or have pleasant feelings if they do enough of it. Nowadays I mix my meditation and physical exercise by doing Tai Chi so I can be more time-efficient. ;-)
(Well, not really, tai chi moves are often meditative in feel, but I haven’t been doing actual on-purpose meditation during it. But that might actually be an effect booster, so now I’m tempted to actually try it.)
Hard to say, because before that I didn’t meditate systematically. I gave it a few tries, then forgot about the entire thing for years, then tried again. (Also, not sure whether I should include the time spent doing Silva method as not the same thing, but still about mind control.) Something between a month and a year since I started seriously trying to achieve this specific outcome.
The technique was counting your breath until you notice that you are distracted by internal monologue, then start again from 1. (My rule of thumb was that “distracted” means either that I am not 100% sure which number follows, or that I keep a certain topic of internal monologue longer than during one breath.) The first few attempts felt insanely impossible, like: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “oh my god I am so awesome I am finally doing this correctly… oh shit”, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “great, doing this again, this time I shouldn’t start talking to myself… fuck, I just did”, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, “yes, just don’t ruin it again by… eh, doing exactly this, again”, 1, 1, 1,… It felt impossible to not make a meta comment on either my recent progress or the lack thereof. Plus the frequent unrelated thoughts, of course.
Then at some moment, I was travelling by a bus somewhere, and I was like: “I will keep doing this until the bus gets to my destination, regardless of whether it works or not.” I guess that achieved the paradoxical conditions of trying hard to do something while kinda being outcome independent. It started getting better, then I made a mistake, but I didn’t care and just started again without a strong emotional reaction, and the time intervals between mistakes became longer and longer. And it didn’t even feel like I was trying hard. Just, doing it, with greater or lesser success. And then, in addition to short internal monologues shorter than one breath, there were also moments with no monologue.
Afterwards, I already had the experience of what it feels like to be internally silent, so I can just try to go directly to that state. It kinda feels like holding my breath, except I am not, but it feels like a muscle tension at the back of my palate. It only lasts as long as I am aware that I am doing this. From certain perspective, it’s like I have replaced the verbal monologue by a non-verbal stop signal. (So I guess the next level of meditation would be to notice all these non-verbal self-signals and somehow stop doing them, too.) This was also more difficult and felt more forceful at the beginning, then got easier.
You probably know the book Don’t Shoot the Dog. I found it helpful at understanding what is happening; specifically that you are not supposed to punish yourself for failing… but also not supposed to meta-punish yourself for accidentally punishing yourself, etc. I suspect that before doing any awareness meditation, one is supposed to do lots of loving-kindness meditation, exactly for the purpose of getting the self-reinforcement mechanism right. No punishment whatsoever on any level at any step of meditation. Because ultimately, punishing yourself for doing X is inevitably connected with punishing yourself for noticing that you did X, which goes against the goal of noticing it all.
I think I could stop the internal monologue at any moment I want, but without it I am unable to do some things, for example to write text. My ability to read text is also impaired; I can read individual words, but I do not understand the meaning of the sentence. But I can e.g. walk.