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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

I agree.

Meditation made a little “high” on life. Careless to the point of physical injuries. Stress via excess is obviously bad but it’s better guide in life than an utopia nirvana.

Like if you look at a colony of beavers. Some are building a dam, others are collecting fruits, kids are playing in the river, some beavers are making love, … . And you have Dave. Dave just stay there 5 hours straight in some sort of yoga position. Just lost in his thoughts. Doesn’t contribute or do anything. Is there any value to be Dave?

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Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

One of the points about meditation is about being present, fully experiencing the present moment. By fully experiencing every present moment, you fully experience your life. The opposite would be living perpetually in the future or in the past; not living your life, but continuously preparing to start living it some day.

In your example, the beavers being present and building a dam/collecting fruits are in fact the equivalent of skilled meditators. Dave 'lost in his thoughts' is a person unskilled in meditation, the default situation for a lot of people a lot of the time. Consider how many hours a week people tend to spend distracting themselves, 'lost in their thoughts' - time better spent just sitting and doing nothing, getting bored, and then getting an urge to be creative - like when you were a child.

Yeah, but is there any hard data supporting the idea that enlightened people (or people who meditate, or whatever) are more creative or do more interesting things with their time?

My vague understanding was that, given any objective measurement of psychological "success", enlightened people are statistically indistinguishable from un-enlightened people.

If they aren't, it certainly seems non-obvious to me. The world hasn't been taken over by a wave of super-mindful people who use their awareness of their own emotions to make the best decisions about everything.

> Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

My understanding is that this actually highlights the "meaninglessness" of enlightenment -- but you don't know what you missed if you never went through that phase.

And, my personal interpretation is that, given that one already went through all that trouble to attain it, it must have some profound meaning by definition. (To the "one must imagine Sisyphus happy" vibe.)

> And, my personal interpretation is that, given that one already went through all that trouble to attain it, it must have some profound meaning by definition.

Wouldn't this depend on what "profound" means? The "lean" model of enlightenment favored by Daniel Ingram and other modern practitioners is that it's really about progressively dispensing with the psychological "need" or "craving" for some sort of personal identity (in the philosophical sense). It's one thing to reveal that personal identity is an illusion (that's comparatively easy in many ways), another thing entirely to restructure your underlying thinking process so as to fully engage with the world without needing to constantly refer back to that basic worldview. There's plenty of room for disagreement as to whether that's 'profound' enough!

If Dave is happy that's fine. But Dave gets injuries, psychosis or schizophrenic episodes, that's probably bad.

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