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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Meditation doesn't solve any real problems; at least not more than any other religious belief. It seems really strange to me that nerds frown on certain religious beliefs while lauding others. We're in the territory of the unmeasurable here, so I'd say that tolerance goes first.

But a lot of smart people bash the belief in God when it presumably gives meaning to depressed people, or helps drug addicts and criminals get their lives in order. The same smart people praise psychotherapy or meditation for the same results. It's hypocritical. I'm a tolerant guy and as long as other people's beliefs don't get in my way, I accept them. But when rationality and reason are your most important virtues, it's contradictory to support a schism like this one.

These questions are always questions of the current immeasurable, unprovable part of human nature, and should be treated as such. You can't use the words meditation and scientific in the same sentence.

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Do you know anything about meditation? While its origins are religious, it's a secular practice that's about learning to stabilize your mind and develop inner balance.

It's only religion if you think that you're developing a communion with God through meditation. If you meditate to commune with yourself, then it's entirely sensible to laud meditation while bashing religion. Meditation is not superstition.

Meditation is not superstition, true, but one should still be aware. It does tend to attract the same people. I'm an atheist meditating, and occasionally I have to grit my teeth.

You don't know what you're talking about. Meditation absolutely solves problems, it teaches you to control your mind and your emotions and most people need to be better at that.

It's just a matter of awareness, meditation is nothing more than practicing awareness of how your own mind and body operates. There's nothing unscientific or irrational about this, in fact it's quite rational.

Meditation is also not anything remotely similar to a religion, nor does it require you to believe anything absurd. That you chunk them together like that says you haven't really ever looked to deeply into the subject.

Religion requires that you believe in things that require faith. Meditation and psychotherapy don't. I don't really care about that myself - if Jesus helped you stop smoking crack, great, whether he's real or not, but it's a big deal to some people.

There are measurable effects of all of them, including meditation. You can quantify depression, personality traits, drug abuse, etc. You can measure brain state, skin resistance, heart rate, blood pressure, etc. All of this has been done.

If anything, meditation pulls one away from all harm that religion pushes -- namely lack of one's own will, "sleep-walking", belief in illusions created by other people.

I got away from my stupid childhood illusions and dreams (including religion, love, patriotism, etc) by meditating, taking disassociative drugs and astral projection. After you experience these really perverted delusions you start questioning other delusions and hence get closer to a reality.

So: religion = delusions, meditation = reality. There is a reason meditation is called exploration while religion dictates unquestionable obedience to other humans.

I'll submit that it could be measurable and provable, but we haven't figured out how to do it yet. It's quite obvious that after meditation, something has changed within me. I don't know how to quantify it, but it's a marked change. The fact that modern scientists aren't able to measure or reproduce that change doesn't necessarily mean it's not real; it could mean that we simply haven't yet established the tools to do so (or, maybe some have, but are ignored).

The comparison to organized religion is invalid. Outside of the religious context, meditation can be considered breathing techniques that calm the mind.

I have read studies which compared the brain activity of monks who have regularly mediated for decades and lay-people. There are measurable differences.

edit: an example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan...

There are measurable differences between the brains of concert pianists and checkout clerks as well. It doesn't mean that the change necessarily represents something that improves the human condition. If I was to practice balancing pencils on my fingertips, four hours a day for 40 years, you could certainly detect that my brain had become different from that of a random individual.

Whether meditation brings a peaceful state that is preferable to the one that comes from drug use, a stable family, rustic living or some other lifestyle is an entirely different question which probably can't be answered by science. It's nothing more than a lifestyle choice.

My intention was to point out that the results of meditation are something we can measure. This was, when I read about it at the time, news to me, and it appears to be news to the person I was responding to.

My intuition is that anyone who engages in focused practice of an activity that one can improve in will show similar differences in their brain activity. That is, I think there is a similarity to meditation and what we call "being in the zone" for activities as varied as basketball to programming. My personal experience is that such practice is beneficial.

Objective measurement is cool, sure, but more important here is how meditation makes you feel.

Actually this is a kind of measurement, one to which only you have access. It might be condemned as subjective rubbish by some, but it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Unlike religion, you aren't required to believe anything. Unlike mainstream science the result will not be publically reproducible. But that's OK: you're trying to advance self-knowledge, not public knowledge.

If someone could objectively show that focused practice of an art has the same mental benefits of meditation, then I would consider that personally useful, not just "cool."

Yes, that would be useful. And it remains open to you to try both now and compare how they make you feel.

The article seems to be claiming that all lifestyles without meditation lead to suffering. This is a pretty strong claim, don't you think? It goes beyond benefit and utility. At root, all of us are trying to feel better. Even physicists are motivated by perceptions of beauty.

People seem to think that being motivated by feelings isn't rational. But irrationality ultimately feels bad.

I can't comment much on the article itself; I gave up on it pretty quickly because I found the author's attitude condescending.

Is it possible that what is being measured isn't actually the _result_ of meditation? What if people whose brain works a certain way are the only ones who can sit still for hours at a time every day for many years? I know I couldn't.

You have mentioned some important commonalities, but what do you think make psychotherapy and meditation stand apart from religions? Would you list a few of the major differences?

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