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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Think the article is right in its diagnosis of mindfulness. Jack Dorsey going on a meditation retreat so he can go back and be even more productive at building the things that send everyone to meditation retreats has always been kind of funny to me.

The trend to turn spiritual practices into some sort of self-help healthcare to me is honestly just abysmal. In many ways it is worse than just not doing them at all.

C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan, but nothing in between. If you reject spirituality at least you acknowledge to take it seriously on its own terms, if you commit to it that's fine as well, but when you profane religious practices by turning them into some kind of corporate new-age productivity exercise in my mind it's about the worst of all worlds.

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I studied Vedanta in India at an Ashram for 4 years continuously without break.

One of the things my master would emphasise a lot was that physical yoga is the first stage on the spiritual path and meditation is the last. But he says they are easy to teach and have become completely commercialised in the West only because they are both really easy to instruct.

He cautioned us against the perils of meditation when you are unqualified, pointing out that it may lead to mental illness. In general, the qualification for meditation is total uparati, withdrawal from the world. A state of mind where the objects and beings of the external world have no sway on the mind at all — he would say “there is no push from within, there is no pull from without.” He said trying to meditate with the mind of a typical Westerner is like suddenly putting a brick wall in front of a car speeding on the highway. You will crash and it will be painful.

Some of the Upanisads have lines which repeat which say “this must not be spoken of” — being suitable only for prepared students, but now people walk around talking about illusions and maya like it’s just another How to Win Friends and Influence People or something.

If anyone is interested in reading his perspective on meditation, the chapter with the same name in Vedanta Treatise by A Parthasarathy is instructive.

Thanks for your insight and perspective. Reading about things like this resulted in me mostly stepping away from meditation some time ago. I still find some of the mindfulness skills I learned useful for managing stress, but I've decided not to take it deeper than that.

(One other reason: I had a horrific experience on a dissociative drug that, on further research, seemed to mirror the experience of many meditators who hit that brick wall you mentioned. It was the worst experience of my life, and if I risk hitting that wall again through meditation, it's not worth it for me.)

That's a common and probably valid in general way to look at westerners. However another reputable source said something to this extent: people in Asia have the right culture, the right mindset, but they have it too easy and their progress is so slow; westerners, on the other hand, are so immersed into materialism, their mind is so busy with shiny things, that they have no time for things that matter and their society is unsuitable for anything spiritual, but it is for this reason any achievement on the west counts as many on the east.

My opinion about this meditation thing is that there's something in it, but telling people not to try because it may accidentally destroy their mind is laughable. By the time one develops will so strong and concentration so stable that it may cause issues, one must already be knowledable enough.

That's not strictly true, RE: Lewis. His opinion was even cooler.

Basically, Jesus was either: - A liar - A lunatic - The Lord

And any three of those is incredible and worth learning about.

He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization.

A con artist who did the same thing.

Or literally god, and people are so cynical that ~75% don't believe it

>He's either a crazy person who founded the most powerful organization in the history of human civilization.

I'd argue Rome had a lot more to do with that than Jesus. If Emperor Constantine hadn't found Christians to be expedient to his own political ends, the religion would probably have remained a strictly local Jewish cult, or been stamped out by Rome altogether.

I don't have skin in this game, you're probably right.

All I know is what Lewis thought on the matter.

That’s only true if the Christianity itself is fungible — would Constantine have found any other set of teachings followed by the same group equally useful?

Only if you assume that everything written about him is accurate. If his biographers were mistaken or made things up, then he could have been just a regular religious reformer.

Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

Bear in mind that Christianity was an oral tradition and there were dozens or more gospels and various traditions like Gnosticism which would later become heresy, and none of the canonical gospels are believed to have been written sooner than a century after Jesus' lifetime, and not by their attested authors. It would literally be impossible for everything written about him to be accurate.

CS Lewis' Jesus is the result of judicious editing by the Council of Nicaea leaving a lot on the cutting room floor.

>Lewis seems like a smart guy, so I’m not sure how he missed that possibility.

He was a Christian. By definition he believed in the correctness of scripture. He wasn't actually trying to consider rational alternatives to Jesus' divinity, but to convince the listener that simply accepting Jesus as a moral teacher was absurd with a classic false dichotomy - that one must either accept Jesus as the Son of God or dismiss him as a lunatic. Of course, those aren't really the only possibilities, as the criticism page on Lewis' trilemma shows[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma

For better or worse, Christianity's explanation of that is that the eyewitnesses didn't expect to have to write about it for future generations; Jesus said he'd be right back.

Others have said it, but the 4th option; Jesus is fictional (not necessarily that he didnt exist, just the majority of writing about him is made up or embellished). Still somewhat interesting.

> C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan, but nothing in between.

Horrible example considering that all evidence suggests that "in between" is the right answer: that Jesus was a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews and that was what the cult was centered around for hundreds of years before Jesus was elevated to being the son of God. It's strange that he'd assume the story had not changed.

> C.S. Lewis once said that one can believe that Jesus is the son of god or a charlatan

C.S. Lewis was a Christian so he is using two-value logic. Most Asian philosophies is based on four-value logic hence difficult for Westerners to comprehend in full.

Jesus could have been liar or god or both or neither.

Why can't just take the cultural lessons of the past for what they are and not believe them literally or completely dismiss them?

because they're not just lessons from the past, they're sacred ways of life. They're serious commitments, not something to be scavenged according to your own interests.

Exemplified by the fact that someone who uses Buddhism as some sort of glorified productivity tool hasn't learned anything from Buddhism but does exactly what Buddhism tries to eliminate, namely desire and the self.

The entire mechanistic thinking of treating culture like some kind of junkyard that can be scrapped for parts is itself a product of a sort of spiritually dead worldview.

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