[HN Gopher] Meditation and the Unconscious
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Meditation and the Unconscious
Author : solvent
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-01-24 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Makes me think of how Marvin Minsky thought Meditation was a bad
| thing.
| cowuser666 wrote:
| Can you cite? I'm interested in this idea but it's unclear
| where he discusses meditation as such, rather than things like
| consciousness and introspection?
| simmanian wrote:
| What from the article makes you think that meditation is a bad
| thing?
| vishnugupta wrote:
| "As far as your own inner conflicts are concerned, if you use
| meditation simply as a quick fix to superficially appease
| your emotions, you temporarily enjoy a pleasant deferral of
| these inner conflicts. But as you rightly say, these cosmetic
| changes have not reached the root of the problem.
|
| Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to
| forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You
| are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of
| your mind.
|
| True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is
| not simply closing one's eyes to the problem for a while.
| Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to
| become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive
| attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you
| mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining
| your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you
| need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice
| offers many kinds of antidotes. "
| hammock wrote:
| That comment sounds like it applies to watching TV (or any
| other form of escapism) as much as meditation.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Minsky thought meditation was dangerous in and of itself.
| (e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning)
|
| Personally I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I
| thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept
| unacceptable situations which was already leading me to bad
| outcomes.
| p_j_w wrote:
| >e.g. you aren't meant to inspect your own functioning
|
| I'd be curious how this view is justified.
|
| >I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought
| was harmful because it encouraged me to accept
| unacceptable situations
|
| I've never heard of this being part of mindfulness,
| unless said unacceptable situations were entirely beyond
| your control.
| 613style wrote:
| "Accepting" in the context of mindfulness doesn't imply
| being passive. That's a common misconception. It's often
| said that passivity is the "near enemy" of acceptance,
| meaning one is easily mistaken for the other.
| LanceJones wrote:
| This is an underrated comment. Mindfulness is a precursor
| to objectifying your thoughts, emotions, sensations, and
| perceptions -- rather than "subjectifying" them (in other
| words, you are not your thoughts, emotions, etc). It
| doesn't at ALL mean laying down for others to kick you
| and taking it. They're completely different things.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| glad to see this here and I would expand on it bc I think
| it's so important.
|
| For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad
| meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to
| reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even
| to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all
| be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad."
|
| Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to
| acknowledge something happened without it driving thought
| to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor
| recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a
| few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly
| gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean
| I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I
| still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that
| justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will
| fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary
| person, and he'll get what he has coming.
|
| But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the
| present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy?
| That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance
| is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my
| neighbor injured me for life."
|
| And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to
| get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus.
| When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the
| negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train
| my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my
| current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and
| cool can of cranberry lime seltzer.
|
| We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with
| it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an
| organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't
| have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously
| obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a
| warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma
| or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right
| departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down,
| separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something
| new. This is an automatic process our minds have
| apparently evolved. And it's free!
|
| But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some
| willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting
| here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms
| with it. _not_ appreciating it, but become capable of
| sitting with it.
|
| So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of
| accepting, rather than someone telling you you should
| appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit
| like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All
| this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can
| bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I
| inevitably recall it.
|
| Please accept my compassion for whatever your
| circumstances were and consider the advice of the late
| Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the
| delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you
| will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to
| function better again.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| Meditation is a tool that cuts both ways. It must be
| used, like any tool, with respect and careful practice.
| The Buddha analogized it to a poisonous viper in the
| wrong hands.
|
| I'll give you one example from my own practice. When I
| learned the Mahasi style of vipassana (mindfulness)
| meditation, which has you note sense objects as they
| arise, I noted _everything_ , including conversation. I
| noted "hearing, hearing, hearing" as I'd listen to the
| story of my elocutor. This brought me no closer to
| awakening! The act of hearing and awareness of hearing is
| so very far from understanding the content of
| conversation.
|
| Small misunderstandings like these lead to big
| consequences.
|
| "What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going
| against the flow -- those delighting in passion, cloaked
| in the mass of darkness, won't see."
|
| Abstruse and subtle! Difficult to discern. Difficult for
| anyone, even monks in their monastic redoubts.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Vipassana is _insight_ meditation, which is generally
| contrasted with mindfulness (known as 'samatha').
| "Mindfulness" is generally thought of as a prerequisite
| to insight, though an especially committed vipassana
| practitioner might well develop both concurrently. (The
| aforementioned 'insight' is of course meant as insight
| into the three core features of phenomenology, viz. the
| impermanence of subjective states, the all-pervading
| dissatisfaction of 'craving' and 'clinging' and the lack
| of a true 'self'.)
| lewispollard wrote:
| Mindfulness meditation is a term we use to describe the
| practices that certain famous/influential western
| meditation practitioners developed after coming back from
| the mostly theravada countries that they went to to learn
| meditation practices from the monks there in the 50-70s.
| Generally speaking, those practices were
| vipassana/insight practices, and so mindfulness practices
| are in essence, or at least are modified vipassana
| techniques. Mindfulness is the translation we tend to use
| for the Pali `sati`, mindfulness techniques tend to
| develop this quality of `sati`, which is a kind of re-
| contextualisation of your perception from "I am having an
| experience" to "an experience is happening within
| conscious awareness" in a direct, first person way. And
| yeah, the development of sati, along with other helpful
| factors, can help to gain insight, which is basically the
| way the mind looks at itself and conceptualises its own
| experience, in a kind of self-reflective way, and what it
| means to relax and tighten the tension that holding the
| mind in that way causes.
|
| In these western teachings and in the theravadan
| writings, usually insight is contrasted with
| "concentration", which is `samatha`, which is a kind of
| effortless concentration on one thing. Focusing solely on
| the sensations of the breath at a point in your body is
| one way of doing samatha, or imagining a complex mental
| image (of, say, a mandala) or a simple image like a white
| circle. This kind of meditation is about dropping your
| attachment to everything except this one thing, which
| creates a strong attachment to that thing to the
| exclusion of all else, and this is often pleasurable
| because you're both strongly mentally attached to that
| sensation and it's a sensation that keeps happening at
| high "volume", which is very rewarding. With this you can
| enter states called `jhana` (which is actually pretty
| much the only word in early buddhism for "meditation",
| and through the spread of Buddhism, linguistically became
| "chan" in China, "zen" in Japan, and "seon" in Korea,
| "thien" in Vietnam...)
|
| The reason that they are contrasted is because
| mindfulness practices tend to go the other way and
| include a larger scope of what you are including in your
| attention, for example mentally labelling what senses are
| being activated from moment to moment, or the sensations
| of the body/breath in a more wholesome way without
| blocking out external stimuli, but developing very strong
| clarity on the momentary aspects of those sensations and
| experiences, sort of applying a "samatha" style
| concentration to analysing the sensations as the "three
| core features" you described.
|
| Both the approaches tend to suppress the "hindrances" in
| the mind that prevent jhana and insight. These are
| recurring thoughts and emotions that trouble you and stop
| this kind of mental configuration from happening in a
| stable way. The techniques use up mental and perceptual
| "bandwidth" in holding the mind in a way so that
| attention/awareness and holding on/letting go are
| balanced on whatever the object of meditation is. By
| developing samatha or sati, or a some of both mixed
| together, you can enter interesting and unusual states of
| consciousness that are pleasant, weird, intriguing,
| peaceful- that can be used as a point of inquiry into why
| the mind is grasping at things in certain ways and what
| the result of that grasping is doing to it.
| lhorie wrote:
| Towards the end of the article, they touch on this:
|
| > The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead
| of identifying with it.
|
| The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive
| awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a
| problematic situation that you were struggling with, and
| that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a
| tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the
| "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things
| as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being
| able to see that neither of those options are necessarily
| the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you
| have.
|
| One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people
| talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just
| magically fall into place. I think it downplays the
| difference between being aware of something and the
| effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think
| of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into
| known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because
| you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in
| _some_ way, but the exact way to go about it may not
| necessarily be obvious or easy.
| lewispollard wrote:
| > I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning
| unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't
| actionable because you're not even aware of it. The
| latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go
| about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
|
| I like that and somewhat agree. It's not that some
| mystical force makes life easier for you because of your
| merit, it's just that you have a much greater awareness
| and comfort of your own ignorance. So it's not a surprise
| when that ignorance is revealed by the situations of life
| in stark ways, and you can more calmly respond to them
| than if you were otherwise triggered by them in an
| identified way.
| adfm wrote:
| Minsky had many questionable opinions. Obviously somebody
| consumed by avarice would have an aversion to meditation.
| jimhefferon wrote:
| Could you say more about "consumed by avarice"? I've not
| heard anyone say that before.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Why is that obvious?
| i_like_apis wrote:
| I've always found it interesting that many meditation
| techniques involve "emptying the mind" or "clearing the mind"
| of thought.
|
| While practicing concentration on a single point of focus
| definitely seems useful for strengthening the mind, I'm not
| sure that practicing a state of being completely devoid of
| thought is necessarily healthy. I would rather meditate on
| being _full_ of thought, and thinking of many things
| simultaneously, or meditate on focus in a high distraction
| environment.
|
| I wonder if there are meditation styles that embrace this?
| vidarh wrote:
| Concentration meditation is in large part an exercise in the
| ability to focus, not on emptying the mind per se, though
| some traditions will use exercises that expect it.
|
| But concentration meditation is not an end in itself, but
| generally a tool to aid in meditating on other things,
| including on thoughts ariaing on your mind, bodily impulses,
| emotion and others.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I think a Buddhist might argue that one's mind is a high
| distraction environment.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
| but by making the darkness conscious.
|
| The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not
| popular."
|
| -C.G. Jung
| leoh wrote:
| I am in agreement with Jung; yet not to only make darkness
| conscious, but by beholding it with love and presence...
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