Apathy and silence works just fine.
Mockery satisfies me.
My response is that if they want me to believe it they have to prove it’s real. I’ve read hundreds of fiction books in my like and don’t accept them as reality even though they don’t start with “this is a work of fiction”. I don’t believe everything I see in a commercial. Why should I believe these yahoos? Why should they be held to a lower standard of evidence than George Lucas?
So I treat them like I do George Lucas - I’ll cheerfully discuss the fictional worlds they propose, but I don’t internalize them as part of my belief system any more than I worry about midichlorian infections.
Im getting that I’m terrified that the whole life I built and considered to be the real “me” is just fabricated and illusory. That my likes and dislikes are not unique or real but just a result of programming and conditioning. That “i” am just an illusion. A construct and not inherent. That the real “me” according to them is empty.
Like how you don’t really like what you like or you don’t really like your “interests”, you are just conditioned to. Your interests aren’t inherent otherwise they would not be dependent on where or when you were born. It’s like the idea of a “me” that I believed I was (with likes, dislikes, and interests) is a fabrication and not the truth of what you are for real (empty).
Apathy doesn’t work because it doesn’t refute their point. So far I have been trying to work out for myself something that negates their claims but I end up proving them. I haven’t seen anything either on here or other people/places I ask. Plus in my mind the fact that such a place still does business must mean there is some truth to it, right? Or no?
Okay then. Embrace their bullshit because you lack the intellectual vigor to deny it,
THat’s kind of why I am on here because from what I see I can’t find a flaw in my reasoning.
They are not using reason to reach their conclusions, so they cannot be reasoned out of them, nor is reason the tool to use to counter them.
There are lots of different practices that fall under the umbrella of meditation. But if any meditation practice is doing you harm, stop doing it. One of my favorite stories is about a friend who decided to do a particular meditation daily for 40 days. But a few weeks in, she started to feel depressed and disconnected. She went to the teacher that recommended the meditation and asked for advice. He said “don’t do it anymore”.
I’m still trying to parse your sentence about singing about abandoning your family, wealth and status and the stuff you think makes you human. But that should be a huge-ass red flag and you should run away fast if anyone suggests that as part of the path to anything. There is a meditation retreat I go to every couple of years. One of the things they do is make you pledge NOT to make any major life changes for at least 60 days after the retreat.
Then there is the idea that “attachment and resistance are the root of all suffering”. But, to me at least, that’s about how you RELATE to the things and people in your life. It’s not a wholesale rejection of having things and people in your life. It’s about not attaching to thought patterns and reactive behavior that doesn’t work for you anymore. It’s about understanding how you “attach” to some emotional states and resist others. It’s about how you attach to the idea of what you want a relationship to be without examining the reality.
It’s not about literally giving away all your worldly possessions, it’s about just having them without attaching to them, just letting them be them and you be you, without letting them define you and your place in the world. It’s about not attaching emotional significance to your worldly belongings.
And, really, you need a job, a hobby, something. You need to get out of your head more. And, just for emphasis——- If anyone tells you that you need to make a wholesale break with your family, friends and worldly possessions in order to be happy or complete, run away. Some of these extensive meditation practices are very psychologically powerful and there have been a lot of unscrupulous people and organizations that have taken advantage of that.
Unfortunately I cannot get out of my head. School, work, even my hobbies and sleep, nothing puts a stop to it.
But not attaching significance to worldly belongings is painful. Most people have something that means a lot to them, like a memento. If I am not attached to the people I care or love then apathy comes in. Without attachment you get indifference and that seems to be the result of abandoning everything or “no attachment”.
Even the bits about “you are the universe” or how the mind maintains the illusion of separation haunts me. Granted I haven’t seen proof of it, but they just claim that advanced meditation reveals it by “stilling the mind” and notice vibrations.
In the end it’s still about not wanting to live a lie or delusion, which is what Buddhism or most meditation places say we are. That when you still the mind you see life as it really is, well I did it once and it’s not a place I want to be. But anything else would be a lie. As much as I want to say no to all that I can’t without a good reason or else it’s just confirmation bias.
It seems that you had some kind of profound experience. Can you please tell us more about it?
Simply put it was one in which nothing people usually say about meditation happened. It was like nothing mattered anymore and I lay there paralyzed but feeling nothing. No joy, no sadness, nothing at all. Followed by a disconnect from a “me” and things seemed to bleed.
But to put it to one word, void would describe it well. But listening to them didn’t improve my life and I never filled recovered from that moment. Motivation is difficult and even getting out of bed is a chore, just like living is. When I tell them what happened from meditation all I get is “I’m sorry”. Like that helps.
Thanks. If it was an experience where “nothing people usually say about meditation happened” then the conclusion is that it simply wasn’t the same experience that people talk about in meditation.
Bear in mind that there are many different types types of meditation which have different effects. All meditation is not the same. You could say that the term ‘meditation’ is like the term ‘exercise’. Excercise could be weight training, or jogging, or swimming, or going for a long walk, or many other types of exercise. The objects of different kinds of exercise are different, and the experience is different.
To repeat something I said on another thread, different types of meditation have different measurable effects on the brain.
A paper in the Journal of Consciousness and Cognition proposed three categories of meditation techniques based on EEG signatures:
-
Focused attention:
e.g. Tibetan Buddhist (loving kindness and compassion), Buddhist (Zen and Diamond Way), and Chinese (Qigong).
Characterized by beta/gamma activity -
Open monitoring
e.g. Buddhist (Mindfulness, and ZaZen), Chinese (Qigong), and Vedic (Sahaja Yoga).
Characterized by theta activity -
Automatic self-transcending
e.g. Vedic (Transcendental Meditation) and Chinese (Qigong).
Characterized by alpha1 activity
Qigong includes several different meditation practices, which is why it appears in all three categories.
Your experience doesn’t sound like the object of any kind of meditation I’ve ever heard of. It was an experience of emptiness and lack of fulfillment. All meditation aims at a positive effect.
I don’t know much about Buddhist meditation techniques, but I do know about Vedic or Hindu techniques. The object of Vedic meditation is samadhi, which can be described as easily by fullness as by emptiness, both being just words. Samadhi is said to be characterised by three qualities together, though a verbal description is inadequate:
- Sat - purity, simplicity, no shadow or impurity.
- Chit - pure consciousness, awareness or alertness itself without thought or movement of the mind.
- Ananda - bliss, fulfillment, fullness, pure satisfaction.
Buddhists talk of emptiness, but I wonder whether this is the wrong English word for what the various Buddhist techniques are aiming at. I defer to experts on Buddhism.
Your experience… sounds like an experience from abnormal psychiatry. It’s not a meditation experience, and it is not a revelation of ‘reality’. It’s an abberant experience of detachment from reality. I understand that it was a very powerful experience, but it is certainly not an insight into reality. The mind can sometimes get into all sorts of unusual experiences.
I think you are wrongly attaching to your experience to descriptions of meditation that mean something different.
Except I am not. You don’t really hear about the negatives that result from meditation. When I tried loving kindness,it didn’t work. Open monitoring and focused attention somehow ended up giving me this current state I live in. Some people do end up suffering from dissociation and depression because of meditation. You just don’t hear about it.
Then you get others who say that Buddhism’s claims from meditation are wrong, that they have the actual insight and it is not “fulness” or contentment. In short for every one that says X another says Y. Meditation teachers tend to blame adverse effects on the person and not the method. Meditation isn’t exercise but more like “medicine” and like medicine it can have adverse effects on some people. Some on “nonduality” say that at the deepest levels you realize that everything is pointless. So I don’t trust the studies or claims of mediators that much. Meditation isn’t a universal good.
But this is not the point. I’m telling you what happened and what some people said, and looking to resolve this. Because waking up and not wishing to leave bed isn’t a way that I want to spend my life, but the words and “teachings” of many of these people still haunt and sap me of energy and motivation.
Not to mention their weird stuff that taunts my brain like how “god is playing hide and seek with itself”, or " the illusion of self and other", or “how the world is suffering from a crisis of consciousness.”
Additionally there is the “there is no you just the universe” which has disconnected me from the rest of humanity. Instead of people or animals I care about it’s just “universe” or “god” (from what they say). Without seeing individuals I don’t really have anymore compassion or care for them or what happens. I don’t know how that’s supposed to build empathy and compassion, the opposite seems the case. It makes friends and relationships complicated.
The various viewpoints you’ve relayed from this outfit come across as a jumble of disparate ideas. I’ll remark on one of them for now.
“god is playing hide and seek with itself” — this is the theme of many writings and talks by Alan Watts. If you would like to pursue this line of inquiry further, I can recommend Watts because he talks about it with an impish sense of humor, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and keeps it all quite sane. Maybe it would help keep your mind on the rails. Even though this stuff has been poisoning you, I recommend Watts because he sets an example of staying sane and lighthearted about it that may help you assimilate the strangeness easier. Kind of like steering into a skid to regain control of the vehicle.
That’s a terrible idea as reading this stuff is what caused it in the first place. Anymore would just push me over the edge, it nothing like steering into a skid (which is proven to work).
What they are talking about with the mind is kind of a threat to how I live. I mean “cleansing the false mind” would be like removing the meaning I assign to the things I love and enjoy. It would be viewing things “as they are” which is empty of whatever I assign or judge them to be. If hat happened then I would be in stasis since I wouldn’t be able to make a choice. It would be “peace” at the cost of figurative “death”.
My perspective on this is that they’re saying that if you take a patch of land and build a house on it, the house doesn’t exist because it wasn’t originally part of the land.
This is nonsense, of course - the changes you make to a thing are real, and they matter. Suppose you actually were conditioned to like something - for example, spicy food. I think that nobody naturally likes spicy food - it’s painful. You have to acclimatize yourself to it. So in my opinion the liking of spicy food is a good example of a conditioned preference.
The proposed theory is that being a conditioned preference, a preference not part of the original clean slate they’re claiming everyone once was, makes the conditioned preference somehow ‘less real’. The problem with that is that it’s obviously untrue - people who like spicy food really do like spicy food! It’s not some act they’re putting on - you can’t fake that. It’s a real preference. Learned or not, unoriginal or not, it’s still real.
So them claiming that the changes you’ve undergone in your transformation from a zygote are unreal or a fabrication is bullshit. Straight up bullshit.
This sounds like they’re saying that we’re all just hand puppets that God/the Universe is playing with - like you can just pull the puppet off of us and find God’s fingers waggling around inside. Or equivalently we’re all just characters in a story God is telling - we think we’re individuals but in actuality everything everyone says or does is dictated by a single controller.
In my opinion Cogito Ergo Sum defeats this. Were we puppets, the guiding intelligence behind our actions would be aware of this, and would also aware that it controlled everything else - as the puppeteer it can’t possibly control two puppets without knowing it’s doing so. But we have self awareness, and the self we’re aware of isn’t puppeting everything else. This means that our awareness isn’t just God pretending to be us - God would see things differently than we do.
I’m sure it’s possible to meditate or take drugs in ways that make you feel like our mind is being spread out through the whole universe, but if you were really a dungeon master playing the Machinaforce character in a tabletop game, you’d be aware of it.
I don’t know why they call it false though. The idea seems to be that because it’s a construct that it’s not the “Real you” just a mask. But preferences and taste change across our lives, and humans don’t fully develop until many years. Making a statement like “being pure like a child” (which is what they say although that isn’t true and depends on their idea of it) would be false, since children don’t know much. I know as a kid I was afraid of things that as an adult I know are silly, children are also gullible too. Why try to emulate a stage of our lives where we aren’t finished growing? It’s like calling a caterpillar pure when it’s not the final stage. Not to mention children today are different than in the past.
IT seems to be based on the idea that if it changes then it’s not real or true, when the reality is that life is nothing but change.