Comment by wu-ikkyu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wu-ikkyu | Hacker News Reader

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>"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And, therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive – that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life – you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not meditating. Because, the future is a concept; it doesn’t exist. As the proverb says, “Tomorrow never comes.” There is no such thing as tomorrow; there never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking; there is only a present – only an eternal now.

It’s funny then, isn’t it, that one meditates for no reason at all. Except we could say, ‘for the enjoyment of it,’ and here I would interpose the essential principal that meditation is supposed to be fun. It’s not something you do as a grim duty. The trouble with religion as we know it, is that it is so mixed up with grim duties, ‘we do it because it’s good for you, it’s a form of self-punishment’. Well, meditation when correctly done has nothing to do with all that. It’s a kind of digging in the present; it’s a kind of grooving with the eternal now. And it brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it’s at, is simply here and now."

~Alan Watts, The Art of Meditation

I know that high level meditation is supposed to have no practical purpose, but that is exactly what is bothering me. What would be the utility of that, from an evolutionary point of view, or from a reinforcement learning point of view (where we divide the world into agents and environment, with goals and rewards).

The spiritual utility, as it is presented in tradition, is related to attaining some sort of freedom and realization, a subjective feeling. But I am thinking (devil's advocate) that all are just patterns of activation in the brain, in other words, just perceptions and emotions. And from a practical point of view, there is nothing useful about it - I am referring only to emptiness, not to mindful attention.

Why does it need a utility? When one spontaneously begins dancing, they aren't thinking of some practical purpose or end goal, they're just doing it because it's fun and they're enjoying themselves in the moment.

Anyone who has felt the flow of music come through them and freely improvised, either as a musician or a dancer, is in what I would deem a meditative state. In that moment, they aren't thinking about anything other than what they are doing right then and there, and they're having a wonderful time doing so.

Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-That-Frees-Robert-Burbea/dp/09...

The emptiness you're referring to, if I understand you correctly, is that of sunyata[1], wherein we realize precisely what you have stated: that there is no thing besides patterns and activations, and that assuming these things construct a whole person that has some sort of "centerpoint" is fallacious. Your devil's advocate point arrives at the truth precisely.

The freedom arises when one accepts this fact wholeheartedly. This realization isn't "supposed" to help you, or bring you anywhere, since that would be assuming that the actions that are taken have some internal guidance mechanism that bring it to fruition and bestow benefit on the actor. But no such thing exists. It just happens, is, and you are ok with it (or not). The utility doesn't need to exist because it can't exist: if all there is, is now, utility has absolutely no goals or targets, and thus the only thing supporting its "existence" is an assumption about what may yet does not exist.

[1] http://buddhanet.net/cbp2_f6.htm

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