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Comment by TriNetra | Hacker News Reader

the day you can sit for hours without doing anything, you've attained the state of self-realization – self-love free from all conditions. The conditioned mind is no longer there, the thoughts no longer bombard you, the emotions no longer disturb you. You enjoy the deep peace, contentment and bliss of your infinite self. Then you can truly contemplate deeply on anything you feel important, then the deep mysteries of existence shall open up to you. Then, you see the truth, of life, existence and the universe.

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> Then, you see the truth, of life, existence and the universe.

Pretty words, but do they mean anything? For example, if I reach this state, will it be revealed to me why there is something rather than nothing? I think not, otherwise someone would have reported back with the answer already.

I'm interested in meditation to learn more about my own body and mind, maybe improve my life somehow. But IMHO the discussions around it could do with less of this type of mystic woo.

Would you believe someone who reports back?

FWIW I have a friend who is deep into spirituality, still works at a FAANG but definitely feels like he can attain higher states of awareness in his meditations. I don’t see him active on social media, he leads a reasonably ascetic life and so on.

This person doesn’t have much success in making others believe. At best, he gets ‘hey, I am happy that you’re happy’ from folks like me, most feedback is around ‘mystic woo’. I have another friend deep in this world, but she balances it with real world and doesn’t really proselytize.

I think it is very much a catch 22. You won’t believe it unless you’re doing it. So if belief is required for you to give it a shot, that’s a non-starter.

I would say try it out and make up your own mind! What do you got to lose anyway - stay away from holy men who make you uncomfortable, start with books or YouTube!

Just a comment regarding belief in the context of learning: a lot (in fact almost all) of learning is through our innately held beliefs. Without having beliefs we would be no different than an ML model, which just keeps adjusting weights according to the data it receives. Each of us has some beliefs, which "seems right" to us and this is what shapes our understanding of what we see around us, no matter what the "data" says.

If the belief is weak (or false), it might lead to confusion and distrust, which will make it impossible to learn anything.

Also, experiencing heightened states of awareness is not necessarily beneficial, people on drugs experience it routinely.

Are you sure that our beliefs aren't "just" (the appropriate equivalent) of a stimulus or data point that has really high weight, e.g. because it was created during childhood and constantly reinforced?

Take the biases that we've heard about in image recognition where these ML models misclassify black people. If a person had done that you would accuse them of racist beliefs.

Why is the computer model so different? Because you don't want to believe that computers can reach consciousness? (I don't either at this point but time will tell. We don't really know enough - or I don't - about what consciousness is and how it works.)

Well, what about Gebru's findings? Data in and of itself is not beneficial, we do have certain underlying beliefs about appropriateness and goodness. There is an element of innate belief at play.

Otherwise, chatbots are very good at learning abusive and racist language. It's due to our belief that it's not right and decent that we train them using a bias. And it's only due to beliefs that we rein in the rogue AI which misclassifies black people.

Edit: If you still want to think of belief as an input node whose link has weight, then set the weight to infinite

Aka every human has the innate ability to distinguish good from evil. This idea is older than dinosaurs.

> I think not, otherwise someone would have reported back with the answer already.

Well, they have, but nobody believes them :)

In any case, I understand your attitude to the mystic woo. It used to put me off a lot when I started meditating.

Now I take it as simply something that's there. They are statements that someone makes. If they're talking about states that someone could reach and they also give instructions, I might consider trying them to see what happens.

In any case as a programmer and scientifically minded meditator, I encourage you to pursue your interest in meditation. Try different techniques until you find something that works. Take it easy, take it slow, cultivate play and joy in your practice. If you manage to do that, you'll reap the fruit of your practice.

I wish you good luck!

> Pretty words, but do they mean anything?

Yes.

> For example, if I reach this state, will it be revealed to me why there is something rather than nothing?

More-or-less. You do get the punchline, and the joke is quite good.

> I think not, otherwise someone would have reported back with the answer already.

They have, over and over and over again. However, it's not something that fits in words. You have to stop wording in your mind, and know. Literally the first line in the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao."

Meditation sans "mystic woo" is like using your car only to drive from your garage to your mailbox at the end of the driveway to get your mail and back. You might learn a little more about your own car, and maybe improve your mail-retrieval somehow, but you're not really going anywhere, eh?

Here's an opinion from a deeply cynical person who's also 15 years deep into this mysticism rabbit hole.

My takeaway is that there's something in this meditation thing. At the very least, concentrating on a static imaginary shape activates some kind of drainage system in the brain: for a few minutes you feel what a clogged pipe would feel when it's being cleaned by a powerful water stream. That effect alone seems valuable.

Regarding the meaning of meditation, my conclusion is that it's a whistle. Just like you'd produce a certain whistle to summon an animal or a bird, you'd sharply imagine a certain shape or symbol to summon ideas or certain effects. The former is how you get inspiration. "Mysticism" begins when you are able to produce this whistle the right way and when you know which thoughts or symbols to target.

The most comprehensive explanation of meditation that's available in English is probably lamrim, volume 4 (500 or so pages, described by its author as a brief summary of key concepts from canonical sources that an interested reader should read himself).

That's basically how they con you into it. Using pretty words which appear to have "deeper" and "transcendental" meanings. They entice you with words like mystery, truth, existence, universe, but the TLDG (Too long didn't go) of this rabbit hole called meditation is (wading in) occult practices.

You first need to get yourself free of the opium of Islam. The unoriginal religion made up by stealing lots and lots of ideas from Judaism and Christianity, themselves sources of much suffering for humankind. The hell and heaven are not of any next worlds but are what you create for yourself and live inside, here on this very Earth. And look at the hellish and backward state of most Muslim counties and their people: People trapped in ignorance, prejudice, poverty in a never ending hellish cycle. If your ideas and beliefs have made this world a living hell for you, how do you expect to die and then wake again in a heaven? The guys that told you so, were really swindlers.

You need to first rid your society from the actual opium and its derivatives. It’s very convenient to throw the opium of the masses on Muslims, when the masses in your society have puncture marks.

And yes Marxism has died. Communism is dead. It’s just a name for brutality and dictatorship.

"the TLDG (Too long didn't go) of this rabbit hole called meditation is (wading in) occult practices"

What do the words "occult practices" mean to you? Do you consider them bad? If so, why?

Occult practices for me means devil worship and associated rituals. I consider them bad because I consider the devil bad.

That's wrong, though. Occultism didn't have the evil meaning until very recently. That's similar to how nazis have changed the public image of swastika: before them it was an Egyptian symbol of light or something of that sort. "Occult" merely means hidden from plain sight. Coincidentally, the most occult thing out there is hiding in plain sight: it's electricity.

It’s got to do with the semantics, and for that you need to keep track of the context in which it was used by me.

> if I reach this state, will it be revealed to me why there is something rather than nothing?

Contemplation of dependent origination is a meditative practice.

Get Mind Illuminated by John Yates Phd. He breaks down the process into ten steps, woo free.

Thanks for the recommendation. I've read the the free kindle sample now, which is already a couple hours of reading. I found the introduction and and overview very difficult to get through, even to the point of falling asleep. But the "first interlude" and "stage one" captured my attention better.

Although a bit verbose and repetitive at times, I liked the exploration of the concepts of attention and peripheral awareness. I may give the "stage one" instructions a try, and buy the rest of the book if it goes well.

Try A million thoughts https://www.amazon.com/Million-Thoughts-Meditation-Himalayan...

This book may have value to learn something about meditation, but it also has exactly the kind of "mystic woo" I was talking about.

In the first few sentences it talks about the "soul" wanting to return back to it's source, the "supreme consciousness". Then a couple pages further, a statement about reincarnation:

"If you don’t believe in rebirth then this book will be of little use to you. As I said earlier, meditation to me is the most powerful tool to harness and channelize the restive and other tendencies of the mind we’ve been carrying with us over lifetimes."

Or Waking Up by Sam Harris, also woo free.

Thanks, I've read the start and found that Harris does a good job of explaining from the outset why a non-religous, mysticism-averse person would still want to explore this type of spirituality. That part wasn't very clear to me in the introduction of "Mind Illuminated".

There is no legitimate platform for such a person to report back to. There have been many holy books over the years insofar as religions are centred around them.

> there is something rather than nothing

Is there?

I like to rephrase questions and suppositions like this using E-Prime. For me it helps reveal the underlying dynamic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Yes, because if there was nothing, I couldn't be asking the question.

Not if you are hungry. Deep mysteries are fine and all but doing so in -1 deg celcius on an empty stomach lays out the reality of existence with exacting clarity. We are merely animals. Nothing more. Nothing less.

> -1 deg celcius on an empty stomach

Sounds like a walk in the park for an ascetic. We forget how comfortable we’ve become, 250 years ago this would have been your average Tuesday.

Show us an ascetic who would find this a walk in the park.

"Published in science journal PLOS ONE in March 2013, the study documented reliable core body temperature increases for the first time in Tibetan nuns practising g-tummo meditation...

"The researchers collected data during the unique ceremony in Tibet, where nuns were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather (-25 degree Celsius) while meditating. Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and temperature measures, the team observed increases in core body temperature up to 38.3 degree Celsius..."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130408084858.h...

So is it scientific or a mystery?

If it’s scientific then it must be well understood in terms of cause and effect. In which case, it is like any other physical phenomenon, nothing special.

And if it’s not scientific, rather if it’s a mystery, then scientists will have to take a call on what is.

Science is not as black and white as it's made out to be. In this particular case, the observation seems to have been made with scientific rigor, so this part is definitely scientific. As for the parts of the causal chain that are not fully understood, these will be subject to further inquiry. It would be fair to call those parts "a mystery", but that doesn't imply them having any "mystical" properties. "Mystical" to me would mean "fundamentally outside the realm of scientific inquiry", not just "we have not gotten around to it yet".

Yeah, that’s basically what I said. Let scientific inquiry conclude on this and then it can be shared as evidence. Otherwise it’s just anecdotal.

Everyone born before 1600? Or maybe anyone who has done winter survival training. Hunger and cold have been with us since the beginning. The spiritual and meditative practices we’re talking about here were developed when these things were just daily facts of life and like other animals we’re adapted to deal with them as a matter of course. Modern humans live lives of luxury unknown to even the wealthiest and most fortunate people in the past. If you want a concrete modern example I’d offer Wim Hof.

This was the original statement "Not if you are hungry. Deep mysteries are fine and all but doing so in -1 deg celcius on an empty stomach lays out the reality of existence with exacting clarity".

It was more about questioning the relevance (and authenticity) of "deep mysteries" and "existence" etc. It was not about whether or not human beings can train themselves to endure such difficulties. Which they can, apparently.

When you said "it would be a cake walk for an ascetic" I thought that by ascetic you meant one who is into meditation and all such "deep realities". Not Wim Hof.

Nevertherless, I personally don't see any virtue in being hungry in -1 degree celsius, if I have food and a warm home. Except in case someone is making money out of it, like Wim.

You might be interested in learning about Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

The fact that we are even discussing such issues shows that we are indeed more than animals. And yes, many such seemingly alluring but deceptive mysteries fall apart much before the onset of difficulties like the one you mentioned

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