= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JenniferRM comments on Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (106)
I'm curious if anyone here who has already done substantial work in this area can speak to potential downsides.
Are there any side effects? If you were going to make a case for learning this technique based on the dollar value of the time to practice and the dollar value of the outcome, what would the ROI calculation look like?
del
My interest is strongly piqued!
With exercise I can see how this works through several layers of inference. Exercise leads to more efficient slow or fast twitch skeletal muscles, a more robust cardio vascular system, more flexible joints, stronger bones, and so on. Being fit makes it easier to exercise and stay fit, and one can see how different kinds of "exercise" fitness would logically connect to issues like broken hips and heart attacks that are the proximate causes of death and disability. Some people can ski in their 80's but most people are dead by that age. The whole conceptual package of exercise is also backed by medical studies that regularly show substantial health benefits to a physically active lifestyle.
With meditation I recall studies connecting it to some "mental health" improvements, but I'm at a loss to fill in the mechanistic details... I'm not sure what scary outcomes I'd be avoiding, what the proximate causes of those outcomes would be, how "different aspects of my mental machinery" could be tuned up as preventatives, or what specific "exercises" to do. I'd heard that cross word puzzles might help with senile dementia, but when I looked up the research just now, the most recent results actually suggest that cross words may delay the onset of dementia but speed the decline after onset. Is meditation like cross word puzzles or is it better... or worse?
Or for that matter, maybe you're not talking about brain physiology. Maybe you're talking about mindfulness and the way it can help people avoid making mistakes in life (though I've never heard good evidence for that).
Given your hours of practice, and the expertise that implies, and your comment about long term outcomes, if you can sketch out any information I would totally appreciate it. I bought some juggling balls after the juggling study came out, and based on sporadic practice I'm up to trying to master mill's mess, but a lot of that is that it just turned out to be fun (which I don't expect meditation to be).
I think if I had concrete "inside view" motivations to work on meditation, I'd be much more likely to give it some time. If you could help with this, you'd have my thanks :-)
del
I really appreciate the effort you put into your answer, links and all. The most interesting to me was the academic-philosopher-becomes-zen-student essay because it attempted to assimilate the practice in somewhat external terms.
I still sort of feel like I'm hunting for a really practical "cashing out" of the benefits I guess. I presume that there are benefits, because social practices usually have some basis for persisting and truly selfish memes appear to me to be relatively rare, so I'm willing to hang out waiting for the value to shine through :-)
Nonetheless, it seems like it would be irresponsible to not at least consider the idea that there actually isn't any net value to expert level meditation practices, but only a small amount of value that's outweighed by the costs, with an overvaluation that grows from cognitive dissonance about sunk costs.
I think this works as a description of many practices other than just meditation - juggling for example! Still, this is the sort of thing I might expect to hear if cognitive dissonance was an important factor for understanding the situation.
Of the benefits there, "fighting akrasia" seems like something that would deliver clear value, if it was an actual benefit. Less akrasia would lead to more effective execution on actually worthwhile plans and that would, by definition, lead to better outcomes. However, that's not the kind of benefit I usually see touted by skilled practitioners of meditation. Instead I tend to see talk of "feelings of enlightenment", "compassion", and maybe some interesting "spirit quests".
So if I'm (1) feeling enlightened enough, (2) already feel compassion for poor people and would actually prefer to feel less while doing more to help people, (3) would rather take drugs or sleep in and have a lucid dream for my spirit quests, (4) directly reject the accuracy of the first noble truth, and so on and so forth with reasons to ignore "internal feelings for their own sake"... in that case what are the "external payoffs" I should look for with meditation? Do I get an IQ boost that's likely to generalize into greater efficacy and higher wages? Do I get to control my personal demeanor to improve my relationships and get better outcomes when dealing with people? Am I more mindful and therefore less likely to get into car accidents (or win sword fights)?
While appreciating that you've helped me understand more about the practice, I guess I still feel like I'm looking for starting points to build an ROI calculation with estimates for costs, risks, benefits, and timeline that can be summed to see if the "percentage gain over time" beats the prime lending rate :-)
del
I think you may have just sold me "by demonstration" :-)
You took my references to "sunk costs" through to mercilessly harsh criticism of yourself (yes, kind of to the point of a strawman) without apparently flinching at all. And when you quoted my numbered arguments that amounted to "pretend these appeals won't move me, then what?" (nailing me on the fourth noble truth with respect to other people in the process), I sort of cringed in precisely the way that I imagine you're talking about when you said:
Except, of course, my "self-reflective cringe-inducing period length" was a day (plus you holding up the mirror) rather than the two year period that you mentioned. The implication seems to be that I'm not self reflective enough to avoid cringe-inducing stumbles on even this small length of time :-/
At this point I have one more question (plus I'll send to a PM after this): How do you pragmatically handle being surrounded by people with substantially less emotional and intellectual self control than yourself?
I imagine that your self control lets you, to some degree, decide how to feel about social interactions, but I would guess that many people could be annoyed by your unflappability unless you did something weird like "pretending to lose control" every so often. I'd be worried that if I developed a similar ability, people might interpret my equanimity as arrogance, or something similar.
Or another potential social hiccup: The "honest judgment of your eyes" seems like something that might cause people with poor self esteem or a measure of guilt to avoid you (as though you radiated an ugh field?) because your presence leads them to imagine themselves as they imagine that you see them, while not feeling that they even have the ability to repair the flaws thereby revealed. If they avoid you, the data wouldn't be in front of you to detect or fix.
Or another way of getting at the concern would be to ask how - if you successfully hold yourself to a standard that prevents you from retrospectively cringing at years distant behavior - how do you deal with the implicit threat to other people via the logic of social loafing?
These kinds of social difficulties seem like major worries when I ponder the kinds of self improvement that you are displaying. If I infer that several years of vipassana meditation could help to develop similar levels of self control, I would want to know before beginning that I wasn't setting myself up for some kind of social pariah status from which I may not be able to retreat.
If you are worried that improving your mental functioning could impose costs you do not want to pay, should you not also at least be asking yourself whether your present mental functioning is already too far advanced beyond optimum, and whether you should be taking some equivalent of stupid pills to dumb yourself down to such optimal level? How likely is it that you just happen to right now be at the optimal point without ever having tried to optimise for it?
ETA: Personally, I'm with Stefan King on this. More clarity and damn the consequences.
del
My turn to list some benefits:
I've noticed that going meta (which I take to mean thinking or intuiting about whether what I'm doing makes sense in terms of my goals in such as way as to lead to appropriate action) is a distinct mental state.
I'm not sure where to go with that except to ask whether it seems that way to other people, and for any further thoughts on the subject.
That's interesting; I've found myself to be quite groggy for at least the few minutes after meditating. Takes me a little while to get back into the real world. But I'm also still new at this.
The American idiom is "bull in a china shop". I don't know whether it's the same in British English.
The most common benefit I see people ascribe to meditation is being less easily irritated.
I can't help with your ROI--I'm very much a newbie to vipassana--but I can address a couple of your points.
This is why I'm doing it. I've been having a specific problem dealing with certain kinds of emotional situations, and since I started meditating it's been much easier for me to let my initial negative reaction to those situations pass, and then choose how I would prefer to deal with them. So it's not about strengthening the rational part of my brain, it's about clearing an obstacle that was keeping me from using it.
Additionally, during most of my meditation sessions, I've felt very comfortable and in control. It's too early to say whether that will translate to greater confidence in the rest of my life, but I have had similar experiences before (confidence in one area -> confidence in others), so I'd be a little surprised if it didn't.
I've found it fun. It's interesting observing physical sensations (or the lack thereof) which I'm unaccustomed to, and some of them are entertaining. I described some of those experiences in the vipassana open thread. There's also jhana, which Will_Newsome describes here:
Maybe you can bliss out easier on drugs, but meditation is free. ; )
Four of my "Measures of progress" seem like practical benefits to me:
On positive reasons to practice mindfulness meditation:
Cognitive Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation (Philippe Goldin)
Mindfulness Stress Reduction And Healing (Jon Kabat-Zinn)
Some research points to downsides, with the potential exacerbation of certain psychiatric conditions (or vulnerabilities to such). Schizophrenia is sometimes mentioned. The other reported downside is related to the fact that 'no free lunch' applies even to things like anxiety reduction. Some of the pressures that you release when meditating actually serve a useful purpose. You don't achieve great things by being at peace with the universe!
Downsides (obviously) apply more to excessive use. If 15 minutes a day is great that doesn't necessarily mean 3 hours a day is good too!
Consider reference.
Abstract:
While this may be true, it's not clear that they are the optimal way towards this end. We may be able to substitute more effective mental forces. See Will_Newsome's comment for an example.
Note that I speak, at Jeniffer's request, only of potential downsides. As great and even life changing as they may be for some, effects like these:
... are not for everyone. This kind of development of awareness can be seen as a rubicon. When you change the way you think you become a different person to that which you were. As the paper I mention describes, the changes are not universally beneficial. That's seldom how the world works, I'm afraid.
You need a knowable direction of improvement, not merely uncertainty about optimality of status quo. We know that status quo is not optimal, for there is no reason to expect otherwise. But it doesn't suggest that any given change is an improvement.
I didn't claim this.
What was the purpose of your argument?
It was just meant to point out the possibility of supplanting useful mental pressures (that could be disturbed my meditation) by more effective mental processes. I didn't mean to make any claim about whether we can reasonably expect to do this; I was just aiming to stimulate thought about the possibility.
(On a side note, this phrase is an anti-epistemic cliché, usually used to make a privileged hypothesis more salient.)
You don't need to "stimulate thought" about this, everyone already agrees. The reason that caused you to use this argument seems to be that meditation is on the side it argues for, but there is no merit to the argument itself, since it states the obvious and doesn't improve meditation's (or anything else's) case. Do you still endorse that argument as worth making?
More charitably, the original confusion probably started from interpreting wedrifid's comment as arguing for status quo, followed by an argument against status quo that would be correct given that assumption.
No. Thanks for being patient and clearing that up for me.
To sum up, it seems that due to (perhaps unconscious) motivated cognition I failed in at least two ways:
FWIW I think that is how I understood wedrifid's comment, though I failed to articulate this when you asked me about my purpose.
Then, it's incorrect that in context your argument was vacuous, since if one says that 2+2=5, it's still worth arguing that 2+2=4, however obvious that is. On the other hand, motivated cognition was still probably the cause of interpreting wedrifid's comment that way.
Trying and exploring meditation seems like a relatively low-risk activity - with potential benefits in terms of greater self-knowledge and self-understanding.
My guesses at the most obvious risks would be: overdosing; changing too rapidly; getting involved with mantra meditation; getting involved with a cult; getting involved with other less-legal forms of consciousness expansion.
Is mantra meditation generally problematic?
A less obvious risk is attempting self-redesign without sufficient competence.
Good point.
I think in most cases the changes due to meditation are slow, so one is not thrust into drastically greater powers before observing how they've redesigned themselves with weaker powers.
The hypothetical slippery slope has you happy with each step, but you had imperfect visibility at the beginning; with full knowledge you would have been horrified at the result.
I find the prospect of gradual identity change (where I'm always locally happy) horrifying if it leads to me destroying things I now hold dear. But supposing that I accidentally took such a course, I'm sure I would be quite content.
Interesting. How does one distinguish preference drift from learning about unknown aspects of preference?
You're right. I think I'm incapable of it. In retrospect can tell you where I drifted from (or was naive about), but even that's just recollections of thoughts and emotion (i.e. not very reliable). I don't see any way to distinguish drift vs. learning about who I "really am" over my history, let alone in the present.
A description of getting oneself into a worse and worse cycle, with something in the neighborhood of meditation as the way out.
The short version is that people try to get rid of problems by methods which they hope will immediately make themselves feel better so that they can go back to the way they were living before they noticed the problem.
However, the restriction of awareness to wanting to get rid of the problem and the fantasy of how one will feel when the problem goes away is a large part of the problem.
Life gets much better when you quit fighting the present moment.
The Bearable Lightness of Being-- more about the implications of not imposing artificial separations on one's experiences.
Yes, it's specifically mantra meditation that is problematic in large amounts, not Vipasanna. Vipasanna is a meditation of greater awareness of the body, and mantra meditation is dissociative. Mantra meditation seems to be fine for 30 minutes or less a day but there are negative side effects when it is done in the long term for much more than that.
http://www.myownmind.com/extmteacher.cfm (there are lots of stories like this out there)
Thanks, though I'm left wondering how much the problem is mantra meditation and how much is inappropriate hopes and fears taught by TM.
Indeed. I did that during my teens, and it may have resulted in several pecularities of my current personality.
The only one I'm sure is due to it is that I am no longer capable of violence; which was the main point of my meditation.
However, while I'm no longer capable of violence, my brain as a whole still IS. It just means that I don't have access to any memories of such events.