Meditation: Why Bother?

This is almost poetry, expertly written.<p>"The essence of our experience is change. Change is incessant. Moment by moment life flows by and it is never the same. Perpetual alteration is the essence of the perceptual universe. A thought springs up in your head and half a second later, it is gone. In comes another one, and that is gone too. A sound strikes your ears and then silence. Open your eyes and the world pours in, blink and it is gone. People come into your life and they leave again. Friends go, relatives die. Your fortunes go up and they go down. Sometimes you win and just as often you lose. It is incessant: change, change, change. No two moments ever the same."

This essay angers me with its presumption. It reads off like a fortune teller reaching for whatever level of generalized sympathy will get you nodding along. Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to see the boiling resentment and stress in watching families sing Sweet Caroline along with the crowd at the local baseball game, or maybe I'm just far too aware of the postmodern tradition of misery the essayist is targeting to, ah, buy it.<p><i>We try to stick each perception, every mental change in this endless flow into one of three mental pigeon holes. It is good, or it is bad, or it is neutral.</i><p>Does anyone actually live just like that or is it a strawman that wrings another drop of ethos from the audience?<p>I don't want to make a statement against meditation, actually. I have some mental antiviral habits that make me think Vipassana as its practiced in the US is half truth and half marketing delusion, but at the end of the day stress <i>is</i> a huge problem and anything that can get people to honestly, psychically relax has its value. My own experience is that meditation can take many forms and truly is a perspective inversion with a great personal ROI. I go backpacking, and I'll recommend it heartily too.<p>I want to go one step further. I've known and spoken to a few people who practice meditation both here and in China and will say the essay isn't wrong in its spiritual recommendation either. I am thoroughly convinced through testimony and personal practice that you can learn a lot from sitting still. There was even a link on HN a few days ago that suggested rational, tested support.<p>But even if meditation were the honest cure for all existential angst in the human condition, even if it cured AIDS and fixed Greece's financial woes, I'd still prefer someone talk to me with respect instead of trying to wheedle their way into my heart with meandering, gypsy-like proselytizing.<p><i>It only sounds bleak when you view it from the level of ordinary mental perspective</i><p>You too can be <i>extraordinary</i>! How many payments is Vipassana? (Well $125)<p><i>There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself.</i><p>The only valuable 3 sentences in this whole business.

That's one of the best essays I've ever read. It says almost nothing about meditation, but it nails every frustration and unhappiness I've ever experienced.<p>It makes me think that if someone can be that insightful, I'm more likely to go along with whatever he suggests because he's got it figured out so well. Maybe it's time to give meditation a shot.

I think that, given a limited amount of time, I'd rather do exercise (cycling) than meditate, as it's a pretty good way of 'getting away from things' and thinking without interruptions, and I also get some physical benefits from it.

&#62;And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it.<p>Or you can embrace that inherent unsatisfactoriness and affect real change in the world.<p>&#62;Examine each of these goals and you will find they are superficial. You want food. Why? Because I am hungry. So you are hungry, so what? Well if I eat, I won't be hungry and then I'll feel good. Ah ha! Feel good! Now there is a real item.<p>I'm pretty sure happiness is the superficial goal when it comes to food. Food can be a want yeah sure, but it's also a NEED.<p>In general I just can't abide by this sort of nihilism couched as noble anti-materialism.<p>If the truest expression of your philosophy leads to you sitting in a cave waiting to starve, freeze, dehydrate, or get eaten by wolves, you can just fuck off.

What's with the see-saw of meditation articles lately? It's better than expected, <i>science™ proves it!</i> It's a waste of time, <i>news at eleven!</i> We'll show you how for only <i>some monies!</i>

This succinctly and so eloquently said everything my father has spent my entire life trying to teach me. It's beautiful.<p>If I have kids, I hope that one day they understand this essay.

I had an understanding of what meditation was while on an acid trip. Some people who've done lsd describe a spiritual experience which they experience. I can say I had a good experience. What I felt was an experience of me and everything around me moving as one. That is to say the universe and I are connected to one another. It is an experience which is difficult to articulate, but something which one feels. This experience is largely missing in the sensory experience of everyday life.<p>However, one of the better parts of my experience was watching the plants. Their movement as one is what one is attempting to mimic in meditation. Plants are immensely connected to the world in a way we are not. Mimicking them is how we can connect ourselves to the same feeling. This mimicking of plants is what I feel meditation is. It is why it became easier for me to meditate after doing lsd than before as the reasoning behind it makes much more sense.<p>Some things which helped me understand meditation at a deeper level are:<p>* Bhagavad Gita - The last couple of chapters make more sense. The whole I am everything was a bit annoying before, but it makes more sense when you get the point. If everything is One, then everything is beautiful.<p>* Foucault's The Subject and Power or anything Foucault - Meditation is supposed to break the chains our desire. Foucault's The Subject and Power is immensely powerful in understanding that we are all part of a system and governed by rules. Humans are by no means free but are held together by a discursive power which we are unaware of. One of the things we are supposed to realize is how we are entrapped by these rules and gain the ability to break rules.<p>If you think this is all tripe please feel free to ignore it. This is after all my own experience and it can be completely different to a different individual.

A lot of people find this article well written, or alternately, they find the article patronizing and some are angry at it.<p>I just think the article is incorrect, which is a necessary consequence of its sweeping generalizations. A quote from the article: "You are a mess." The author spends much of the article telling the reader how unhappy the reader is, how much the reader is suffering. From a rhetorical perspective, I can understand why the author would do this. Yet I'm not convinced that I'm unhappy, and the rest of the article falls apart without that foundation.<p>"It [life] is an emotional roller coaster, and you spend a lot of your time down at the bottom of the ramp, yearning for the heights." To me, life feels more like emotional airplane, at home above the clouds but makes the occasional layover in Detroit.<p>Your experiences may vary.

Based on most of the people I know who meditate, they don't seem to be any different from a random sample. Are there studies that show that meditate is good for X? Perhaps the causation is actually that people with X tend to be good at meditating? Just wondering...

This is very odd. The Buddha expressly forbade charging money for a Vipassana course (yes, Vipassana is that ancient). A real 10 day course is 100% free, including room and meals.<p>Some have suggested simply reading the sutra or running your own course at home, and I won't say it is impossible to achieve the benefit of meditation this way, but the distractions of the world will make it very difficult to really get started.<p>This is why when you go to a Vipassana course, you are instructed to bring no books, no electronic devices, not even a pen to write, as any and all activities will simply help your mind to become distracted from the monumental task at hand.

For what it's worth, I've known a couple of people who have gone off and done the meditation course through Vipassana, and all have heartily recommended it.<p>Saying that, apparently the drop out rate of their course is something along the lines of 60-70%, most people do not have the discipline required to complete it.<p>I personally haven't done the course so I can't comment directly. I would say though, that meditation is beneficial, and I'm sure there are proper scientific studies that attest to the benefits.<p>Certainly the 'bio-feedback' movement is merely meditation techniques with some output you can discern, kind of like a server with monitoring.

I did a 10-day vipassana meditation course and it changed my life. Meditation helps you to understand yourself and your thoughts, and I can't think of anything more important than that. I highly recommend it to everyone.