= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Relsqui comments on A Novice Buddhist's Humble Experiences - Less Wrong Discussion
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 (41)
It seems to me that the pain associated with certain physical positions exists to warn us of potential harm. Circulatory trouble is the obvious one; I don't know if stressing muscles which aren't strong yet is actually harmful, but I'd be surprised if it isn't. Setting aside helpful mental discipline of accepting pain, are you concerned at all about actual damage being done to your body?
I also appreciate that you posted this; it's a subject I'm curious about (as demonstrated by how much I've been interrogating Luke_Grecki). I will try to find the time to read the guide you linked and, if I follow along, try practicing it.
Yes indeed, but I think that I'm going to really need to stretch to improve my flexibility. I'll try not to go overboard with it though.
I was thinking about scheduling a Less Wrong Meditation Day, in a week or two after people get a chance to read up, where we choose a Saturday and everyone meditates for 6 hours, all starting at roughly the same time. You put social pressure on yourself by committing to report back with your experiences, and this way you can try out extended meditation without having to go through with the scary 10 day retreat. Lots of people won't be able to find time in their schedule, but I think a few people might, and if there are enough people then it could be good. I'm really interested in seeing the variance of experiences.
Awesome! Any suggestions that'll make it better than -1? There are some automatic problems of pretension/self-absorption that I'm not sure how to fix, but there might be other obvious problems I'm not seeing.
Ditto. I was in a good routine of arm and shoulder stretches for a while, because of the guitar, but I didn't succeed when I tried to fold some more general stuff (for cycling--legs, glutes, core), and then I trailed off. I wonder how I could get the habit to stick. I suspect it would have to start with normalizing my daily routine in the first place.
That sounds great. I'd definitely want to try it first, to experiment with positions and techniques, but the idea is very appealing.
The people who voted you down would probably have better ideas than I do, but I can guess. The description of effects may not need to be so detailed as to include repetition; recording the patterns might suffice. In the part where you mention the two major poles of LWers and your preference, I'd like to see either more acknowledgement of the counterarguments or less opining. That is, some people clearly disagree with you, because they belong to the other pole; you can strengthen your case by noting why they disagree and why you stand by your position. But I'm not sure that point is needed at all--you could just talk about why meditation is useful to rationalists, regardless of their origins. This is the thing I was needling you about in another subthread, and why I was needling you about it. :)
Similarly:
Even if you don't associate Buddhism and Buddhist techniques with religion of the sort most LWers disagree with, some of them will, and this could bring up hackles. Failing that, it's also advocacy of a general personal philosophy; advocacy of specific techniques in order to move towards specific goals might be better received.
I just want to say that it's really strange reading this two weeks later and having now done the reading and tried it a few times (and planning to do so again right after I wrap up with LW right now). I've been deliberately cultivating the habit of actually doing things instead of just talking about them, but it's startling to come across a concrete reminder of success!
This sounds great. And then making an open thread for everyone to report back?
I was wondering if this sort of thing would be more useful than me writing a post giving instructions. You mentioned (and I agree) that the Mindfulness in Plain English guide is very good, and what I'd end up writing would be a concise set of instructions with some advice that seems most helpful to me. A place where people could report their personal difficulties and respond to each other might be better.
Vipassana as taught at the dhamma.org courses is different than that given in the Mindfulness guide, but I'll address that in another comment.
The whole thing is really confused, seemingly. You have this modern vipassana movement, but the types of meditation endorsed by the vipassana movement are sometimes anapanasati and sometimes vipassana.
There are 16 core instructions of anapanasati, only 4 to 8 of which are actually directly related to breath. And they seem to imply that you should enter the first or second jhanas, but normally you are told to stop focusing on breathing when in jhana and instead focus on the feeling of physical or emotional bliss (at least in the first two/three jhanas); why then such instructions would appear under the title of anapanasati is thus beyond me.
Then in the realm of jhanas there are apparently these weird vipassana jhanas that I've never seen anywhere besides Wikipedia, and are perhaps particular to Burma. These 8 jhanas are a lot more popular and agree more with my limited experience. The vipassana jhanas seem to be describing the results of successful vipassana meditation, whereas normal jhanas are the results of successful anapanasati meditation. But the definitions and meaningfulness of the vipassana jhanas are controversial: Buddhaghosa held that the jhanas were for anapanasati, not vipassana.
Vipassana itself is unrelated to the jhanas, and I do not understand it, having kept thus far within the domain of anapanasati. Only in your posts on mindspace do they seem to share a common theme. But where you focus your perception on different parts of your body, moving your concentration along, it is elsewhere suggested that in vipassana one should consider loftier things, like the 40 canonical objects of meditation. Apparently it is because the aim of vipassana is to investigate the four satipatthana in order to see the three marks of existence, in the process reaching new states of knowledge and then attaining nirvana (bodhi).
I think I'm going to order Buddhaghosa's famous book and try to see where my understanding is shaky.
ETA: Actually, I'm a little saddened that Mindfulness In Plain English was so apparently misleading. Anapanasati is a form of samatha meditation, and thus the jhanas seem to be mostly anapanasati/samatha but with a touch of vipassana (at least that is my naive interpretation). Interestingly, the following is from Wikipedia:
ETA 2: Actually, I think what tripped me up is that it's more subtle than that. Anapanasati in the sense of concentrating on one's breath might be samatha, where anapanasati in the sense of being mindful of one's consciousness as one concentrates on one's breath is a form of vipassana. I am not sure of this, but if true, then there is needless confusion going on that is hard to untangle. But it would be neat if this were true, as it means that anapanasati is both vipassana and samatha at once, which matches the bikkhu's description in ETA 1 as well as my own subjective experience of attaining the second jhana: mindfulness of breath is what let me focus my mind and concentrate, but it was the insights into my breath and the mindfulness of my consciousness of breathing that actually led me to experience jhana. I think. But this is guesswork.
To add to this confusion vipassana is sometimes called a jhana:
O_O
Yeah. Note how I said I was going to write a post on anapanasati and then wrote one on vipassana. I was trying to reconcile the distinction between the two while I was thinking about the post.
In the end I think it comes down to this: you need to develop concentration and you need to apply it in non-judgmental observation of your own mental processes. Some traditions encourage practicing these separately while some indicate that you should practice them in the same sitting. It seems natural to just think of them as a single technique, and this is the perspective I tried to take in my post.
ETA: It may be useful to alternate focusing on concentration vs observation, seeing as you may only be able to make certain observations after developing your concentration to some threshold.
This is the kind of vipassana taught at the dhamma.org courses. Here's how I mentally unified this and anapanasati: I think of the mental procedure of systematically observing the parts of your body as your anchor, which you return to in between observing what's naturally arising in your mind.
As for the jhanas, I've never really thought much about them. I'm certainly interested though.
It seems as if there's a few standard approaches here:
I definitely can't enter the fourth jhana at whim, nor do I feel at all prepared for vipassana meditation. But I think this confirms your reasoning that there are many potentially successful approaches to balancing concentration and mindfulness, which might be good to keep in mind.
Sorry, I kept on editing and editing my comment! But anyway.
Yeah, I think the whole concentration/mindfulness dichotomy hadn't really clicked with me yet; I understood the distinction, but couldn't identify their qualia. Thinking back on my meditation experiences now, though, I understand their difference.
That seems very natural and clever.
I had only a vague idea of what they were until I experienced that incredible body high / uncontainable bliss and checked Wikipedia and the like for what that possibly could have been. Some texts said 'they are distracting, practice vipassana instead' but reading this and just generally looking at how Buddha attained enlightenment via the jhanas made me think that my efforts should be aimed at mastering as many jhanas as quickly as I can. As much as I love meditation, the penultimate goal is awesomeness, and the jhanas are awesome.
Hence I'm a tad wary of the various vipassana practices and will probably keep to anapanasati till I get strong diminishing marginal returns on jhana achievement. (Various texts talk about how desiring jhana makes you less likely to attain jhana. I think what they mean though is thinking about jhana during meditation, not when planning meditative styles beforehand. Hence the Buddha telling people to do jhana, obviously implying that they could achieve jhana despite deciding to aim for it beforehand.)
This rings true to me. It's the most clear description of their relationship I've come across.
I'd like to read that, in addition to the full guide. It would tell me which elements someone who's already practiced this finds especially important.
I'm not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive. An open thread in the discussion section might be good for this, since it wouldn't be of general interest to everyone on LW but the people who are interested could use a meeting point.