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Stefan_King comments on Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills - Less Wrong
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Comments (106)
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: