Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silentbicycle | Hacker News Reader

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Meditation isn't a cure, it's just a good way to actually hear the alarms that may have been going off for years - a diagnostic technique. You hear all of the (demons? background processes?) that you've gotten tuned out, and realize how much mental energy they drain. (Hold on - maybe I have email. And while I'm there - are people on HN voting me up? What was I saying?)

Since meditation is basically just sitting still, shutting up, and listening, anybody who wants to sell you an extreme ZenTM experience is suspect.

You. Just. Sit.

It's boring. So fucking boring. At least the paint is drying. You just have sore knees.

But it helps. While you were so worried about random crap, how many little joys did you tune out? Your morning coffee. Playing with your SO's hair. Pay attention!

And yeah, I'm just as wary as you of someone trying to sell me sitting and looking at myself in the mirror for hundreds (no, thousands) of dollars.

Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=612740

I'm not disagreeing with you. At the end of the day I'm probably not even disagreeing with the message the author wants to convey. I'm just disagreeing with his rhetoric, and I find that philosophically and psychologically vital.

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I've meditated before. I've done it for many hours a week for several weeks in a row. Then I realized I totally agree with davidw's comment here that exercise often does just as good a job without being fucking boring.

Backpacking. You. Just. Walk. (Through beautiful terrible landscapes that you might actively enjoy for a while but will later become a part of literally and spiritually.)

Backpacking. It. Fucking. Hurts. A lot. All day long. All night long. You mentally scream at yourself for deciding to pack each and every single piece of extraneoitivity you're carrying on your back. Each ounce. You curse the world for every stair step up the mountain. Then it all fades into the back of your mind like raining white noise. It's cathartic terrible screaming total peace.

And next thing you enjoy it.

I'm not saying you, generalized, should meditate or backpack. I'm not saying they're the cure for what ails you, let alone what ails the human condition at large. I'm pretty convinced that if you don't feel like you'd enjoy either one of them then practicing one will transform you positively, but I'd never say that exclusively.

But yeah, please do keep telling people to try meditation. I will too. My only beef is when you try to help them decide by pumping them full of psychological sympathy triggers.

Oh, I'm in no way saying that exercise isn't beneficial. I'm a cycling geek. Shit, look at my name. (I also love weight training, and I did Aikido for years, but biking is my thing.) Your body wants you to exercise, just like it wants you to eat well. I'm not here to nag people to brush their teeth, though. C'mon.

Meditation is a different approach. Sometimes being so boring is an asset - It's not all about testing your body.

"Psychological sympathy triggers"?

Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.

Oh, sure. I'm just reacting to people who think that "sitting Zen" is going to make magical enlightenment fairies fly out of their asses. The way Zen/Buddhism was typically presented in the US, you'd think it had summoned Magic Fairies, or at least was full of antioxidants or something.

I think it probably works for most people, but the actual effects really aren't that profound, which fucks with peoples' expectations. You aren't going to be able to fly, but you might catch yourself before you get mad and chew out a friend about something you know really doesn't matter. Which superpower would you rather have?

I'd also recommend that people find a sane local group to meditate with, or whatever, but I don't know where everyone on HN lives and can't give useful advice there, so my advice is skewed.

With the school of Zen I am familiar with you pretty much do "just sit". The practice is called Shikantaza, literally "Just sitting" in english. With 10% chanting and bowing afterwards.

AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.

I sit at a Dojo regularly and occasionally do introductions. We don't teach counting, but do teach following the breath at the nostrils and settling the mind in the hands, as things to come back to once the mind has wandered. There is some technical stuff about posture to learn but basically you just turn up and sit. If they do it differently somewhere else that's cool too, lineages vary.

This is very interesting to me. I have signed up for the free 10-day Vipassana course (dhamma.org).

Some of you may find this blog entry I wrote to be interesting. It is a review of Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love & wisdom.

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/05/the-neuroscience-of-buddh...

I am currently reading The Myth of Freedom by Trungpa. He's definitely assaulted my practice of spiritual materialism.

I am confused about one thing. Trugpa asserts that the benefit to meditation is boredom. Csikszentmihalyi, in Flow, asserts that meditation is beneficial because it is the practice of such a well-honed skill (practitioners become skilled at observing the intricacies of their breath and therefore experience a feeling of being "in the zone", which is basically the opposite of boredom).

Trugpa says that observing the breath is just a useful beginner's crutch.

What do you think? Estragon, would you please chime in?

Focusing on your breath can be a good way to recover after sitting for several minutes and (without realizing it) getting caught up in worrying about whatever crap has been dragging you down. It's a fundamental body function. At the same time, there's nothing inherently sacred about your breath - it's just oxygen keeping you from dying.

Saying, "oh, I lost focus, I'm going to take a deep breath and try to stay here" seems to help most people, that's all.

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