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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Mindfulness as an extreme form of withdrawal

What follows are my conclusions from the research I painstakingly did to better understand my wife's spiritual past with Vipassana.

It is this simple: the word ‘mindfulness’ (which means more or less the same as ‘watchfulness’, ‘heedfulness’, ‘regardfulness’, ‘attentiveness’) has taken-on the Buddhist meaning of the word for most seekers (just like the word ‘meditation’ which used to mean ‘think over; ponder’), and no longer has the every-day meaning as per the dictionary. The Buddhist connotations come from the Pali ‘Bhavana’ (the English translation of the Pali ‘Vipassana Bhavana’ is ‘Insight Meditation’). ‘Bhavana’ means ‘to cultivate’, and, as the word is always used in reference to the mind, ‘Bhavana’ means ‘mental cultivation’. ‘Vipassana’ means ‘seeing’ or ‘perceiving’ something with meticulousness discernment, seeing each component as distinct and separate, and piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing and which leads to intuition into the basic reality of whatever is being inspected. Thus ‘Vipassana Bhavana’ means the cultivation of the mind, aimed at seeing in a special way that leads to intuitive discernment and to full understanding of Gotama the Sakyan’s basic precepts. In ‘Vipassana Bhavana’ , Buddhists cultivate this special way of seeing life. They train themselves to see reality exactly as it is described by Gotama the Sakyan, and in the English-speaking world they call this special mode of perception: ‘mindfulness’.

Consequently, when the Buddhist practitioner carefully cultivates ‘mindfulness’, it is a further withdrawal from this physical world than what ‘normal’ people currently experience in the illusionary ‘reality’ of their ‘real world’. All Buddhists (just like Gotama the Sakyan) do not want to be here at this place in space – now at this moment in time – as this flesh and blood form, walking and talking and eating and drinking and urinating and defecating and being the universes’ experience of itself as a reflective and sensate human being. They put immense effort into bringing ‘samsara’ (the Hindu endless round of birth and death and rebirth) to an end ... if they liked being here now they would welcome their rebirth and delight in being able to be here now again and again as a human being. They just don’t wanna be here (not only not being here now but never, ever again). Is it not so blatantly obvious that Gotama the Sakyan just did not like being here? Does one wonder why one never saw his anti-life stance before? How on earth can someone who dislikes being here so much ever be interested in bringing about happiness on earth? In this respect he was just like all the Gurus and God-Men down through the ages ... the whole lot of them were/are anti-life to the core. For example:

• [Gotama the Sakyan]: ‘If there is someone who is unaware of the Tathagata’s most profound viewpoint of the eternally abiding, unchanging, fine and mysterious essential body (dharmakaya), that it is said that the body that eats is not the essential body, and who is unaware of the Tathagata’s path to the power of virtue and majesty; then, this is called suffering. (...) you should know that this person necessarily shall fall into the evil destinies and his circulation through birth and death (samsara) will increase greatly, the bonds becoming numerous, and he will undergo afflictions. If there is someone who is able to know that the Tathagata is eternally abiding without any change, or hears that he is eternally abiding, or if [this] Sutra meets his ear, then he shall be born into the Heavens above. And after his liberation, he will be able to realize and know that the Tathagata eternally abides without any change. Once he has realized this, he then says, ‘Formerly, I had heard this truth, but now I have attained liberation through realizing and knowing it. Because I have been entirely unaware of this since the beginning, I have cycled through birth and death, going round and round endlessly. Now on this day I have for the first time arrived at the true knowledge’. (Chapter 10: The Four Truths; [647b]; ‘The Great Parinirvana Sutra’; (T375.12.647a-c); Redacted from the Chinese of Dharmakshema by Huiyan, Huiguan, and Xie Lingyun (T375); Translated into English by Charles Patton.

It can be seen that he clearly and unambiguously states that he (Gotama the Sakyan) is ‘the eternally abiding, unchanging, fine and mysterious essential body’ even to the point of repeating it twice (‘the Tathagata is eternally abiding without any change’) and (‘the Tathagata eternally abides without any change’) so as to emphasise that ‘someone who is able to know that the Tathagata is eternally abiding without any change ... shall be born into the Heavens above’. And to drive the point home as to just what he means he emphasises that ‘the body that eats is not the essential body’ ... which ‘essential body’ can only be a dissociated state by any description and by any definition. Whereas I am this body that eats ... and nothing other than this.

Put briefly, the idea of meditation is to cut off from sensate experiencing and to stop thinking (as in become the watcher) and allow imagination and affectation to take over … and lo and behold … a new very-grand ethereal-like alter-identity emerges.

There's some truth to this. But also a lot of confusion (I won't go into technical nuances others have explained to you well enough). Buddhism does appeal to pessimists, yet some have reinterpreted it into a life-affirming religion that only seeks to restore authenticity of the impersonal Being and eradicate the ego, the internal bureaucrat begetting the target of suffering, the self-important rampaging mechanism for stringing together episodic memories… which in the West got further trivialized into «mindfulness» practices popular with the middle class, which promise ridding the client of neuroses, conflict-prone behaviors and such. The less is said of «Eastern Spirituality» gurus of the second half of the 20th century, the better. But then in Tibet you have praying wheels and the rest of blatantly Hindu silliness which Gautama Buddha himself, atheist of the highest caliber, would probably just sigh at.

It's very hard, perhaps impossible to convey even very simple truths such that no meaning drift will occur – especially when the straightforward interpretation of your truth creates a selection mechanism winnowing out those who see it most clearly. Religion may start as a coherent philosophy, but it matures and stabilizes on the level of ritual that soothes the traumatized peasant – without driving him or her into extremes of societally disapproved cultism. Maybe that's what it's best used for.

Like Borges says in his book about buddhism "the conversion of a congolese negro to the faith of Jesus Christ is really the conversion of the faith of Jesus Christ to a congolese negro". People are just going to do whatever they want, I even see it with american online catholics: why are you doing lent and reading the bible? Why aren't you worshipping your local saint/icon of mary?

its not like the romans did not change christianity when they converted to it.

You'd almost think it isn't a polytheistic religion.

The sutta you quote is a Mahayana one. When it talks about an "eternally abiding... essential body" that's most likely a reference to the Mahayana concept of Buddha Nature, which has nothing to do with individual disassociation.

Vipassana as commonly understood today is a practice associated with Theravada Buddhism, which doesn't believe in Bhudda nature.

It is the same with all branches of Buddhism. For instance, from Anatta-Lakkhana Sutta (The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic, SN 22.59; PTS: SN iii.66)

Disenchanted with the body, disenchanted with feeling, disenchanted with perception, disenchanted with fabrications, disenchanted with consciousness. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released’. He discerns that ‘Birth is depleted, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world

Note well it says "there is nothing further for this world" ... if that is not a clear indication of a withdrawal from this sensate material world I would like to know what is.

Yes, this is a description of temporary withdrawal from the sensate material world in meditation, culminating in awakening. 'There is nothing further for this world' means that the goal of Buddhist practice has been reached, not that the practitioner intends to spend the rest of his life in some mental la-la land.

Have I been using "mindfulness" wrong all this time? I've been using it to mean deliberately activating system 2 thinking for system 1 activities like eating, brushing teeth, riding a train, listening to a song or making small talk: don't automate, don't let your mind wander, don't multitask, concentrate fully on the activity and perform it deliberately.

Emphasis mine. Far from a "cutting off" of sense data, the exercise as described by Mahasi Sayadaw reads as one that scrutinizes sense data and investigates its nature.

Yes, I understand it that way as well. Very relevant text, I think, for thinking about it without 'spiritual' vagueness: I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage - it speculates on what mindfulness does, physically. Also it shows why more mindfulness is not necessarily better.

I was very observant, introspective, disciplined, and my senses were very sensitive, so I quickly “made progress” in mindfulness and meditation (...) because I was excessively sensitive and trained myself to be vigilant, I kind of broke my mind with mindfulness.

I somehow didn’t think of “getting better at meditation” as reflecting changes in my brain, even though I gripe about it when anybody else forgets that all behavior has a basis in the nervous system. I viewed “do nothing” as a default state, almost how the brain should be, which is not justified at all.

I regarded the changes I saw from meditation as being not really changes at all, but a purer expression of how I was supposed to be, less clouded by distraction and unconscious autopilot. Some of them were pleasant, like noticing colors and details more vividly. I was more able to listen to and observe others without jumping in with my own opinions. The most exciting thing was being able to see more of my inner world. Readers of the blog will know that I’m quite fascinated with my navel, and getting access to more and more of it on demand led to a dangerous addiction. If I did anything wrong in my meditation practice— that is, completely against the advice of all authorities— it was seeking those sensations and insights.

I did not realize what a dynamic, feedback-driven process messing with your attention is. I wasn’t just clarifying my attention like you would clean rust off a bike chain; I was deeply reshaping my attention at multiple levels. In short, I was teaching myself not to get habituated to stimuli and not to pattern-match via sensory deprivation, in particular by depriving myself of my default mode network inner monologue stream (“letting go of thinking”).

Not habituating or pattern-matching are oft-exhorted goals because of typical mind fallacy: it’s common not to be nuanced enough. Many people believe that you can’t make too few assumptions, but it’s not true. We need heuristics for speed and to make room for the things that actually require nuanced attention. I felt the effects of reducing habituation and not pattern-matching across many domains, from verbal thinking to visual and auditory processing. Similarly, it's common to be excessively involved in "ego," or a self-image or self-narrative, and to benefit from loosening yours up and not seeing it as so solid. But when you attack your sense of self and try to train your brain not to build it up, you can lose things like proprioception and self-recognition.

One of the general things that mindfulness meditation aims to do is teach the practioner to perceive sense data more directly and less filtered through preconceived ideas of what it is we're sensing. It seeks to show us that concepts are an illusion, everything from thinking you see a "table" instead of a composition of light and shadow all the way up to our own self-concepts. The biggest harm of reducing the tendency to pre-filter input through concepts is the processing time that it takes to bind all the shapes or sounds or ideas I’m hearing into something my brain can use.

I take in excessive extraneous detail and don't prioritize incoming information as quickly as a result of mindfulness practice. I can cope with it, but it creates a lot of friction without much benefit. I just changed my graphics settings to be stupid high and now the game runs slow. I don’t pattern match quickly enough and it makes my thinking slow and contributes to a foggy brain feeling. I have trouble chunking information in my working memory, at least compared to how I used to be.

Harm: inability to accept "stories," fear of missing details of experience - This fear of making a perceptual or interpretive error leads to a constant sense of unease and bloat from maintaining a lot of unnecessary ambiguity in my models.

Mindfulness interventions have been proven to reduce habitation to stimuli, what is usually described within the originating traditions as “freshness of perception”. I became more reactive in part just from noticing more stimuli, but also because of common Buddhist doctrines that encourage you not to distinguish between internal and external occurrences. All of your perception is you, and boundaries between you and other people or the environment, or ultimately between anything and anything else, are ephemeral and imagined (according to two of the three marks of existence, non-self and impermanence). I still endorse a version of the view that "you" are actually your whole world, not just the avatar in the world, but I don’t believe that your sense of self should try to reflect that— for practical purposes, I am inside my body, which is inside a larger world, and most things that happen in that world are causally disconnected from me.

I think Tolle's "watcher" is the simplest corroboration of the concept I'm trying to get across. From his book "The Power of Now" (on page 99),

As long as you are in conscious contact with your inner body, you are like a tree that is deeply rooted in the earth, or a building with a deep and solid foundation. The latter analogy is used by Jesus ...

As to what he means by "your inner body" there is this (on page 92):

The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being. But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell, or rather a limited and distorted perception of a deeper reality. In your natural state of connectedness with Being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body, the animating presence within you. So to ‘inhabit the body’ is to feel the body from within, to feel the life inside the body and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form

Needless is it to add that this is not at all even close to being the universes’ experience of itself as a reflective and sensate human being?

I have some experience with Vipassana and have been to a couple of ten day retreats. Without getting into long term spiritual goals (such as ending the cycle of reincarnation described above), I would like to talk about some practical effects of the practice.

Put briefly, the idea of meditation is to cut off from sensate experiencing and to stop thinking (as in become the watcher) and allow imagination and affectation to take over … and lo and behold … a new very-grand ethereal-like alter-identity emerges.

You need to separate insight meditation from mindfulness meditation. Insight meditation is absolutely an inner withdrawal from sensate experiencing. In the Vipassana context, you heighten your examination of physical sensations of the body to the point that it dissolves your typical state of awareness of your surroundings. Even your awareness of your body dissolves to the point that 'The Watcher' is all that is left. Then a bunch of other things happen of which I'm probably not experienced enough to speak about into in detail, but you effectively separate your mind from your body. You also separate your awareness from your thoughts leading to realisations like 'you are not your thoughts' which can lead to a paradigm shift in what you think 'You' are and what existence is.

Mindfulness however is a quietening of the mind that allows for full sensate experience without distraction from thoughts (at least full sensation after you complete the meditation session). Using a focus (such as your breath) and stopping your normal cognitive behaviour of engaging with your thoughts eventually slows and stops the normal stream of thought consciousness. For someone who lives in their head (like many people on this board), this can offer a radically different experience. It can allow peace and freedom from thought provoked anxiety. As a practical tool, mindfulness meditation is an amazing way to rest your mind and offer respite from stress. In this state you become 'The Watcher', but still have normal sensation and awareness of your surroundings. For someone who has any sort of cognitive based anxiety, or otherwise needs respite from intrusive thoughts, I highly recommend learning mindfulness meditation as a tool that will increase your resilience to stress.

Edits: Trying to flesh things out a bit.

One of tinder's (the dating app) newer features is the ability to add predefined interests to your profile. These range from various outdoor activities, hobbies, leftwing political causes, or just other random things like sushi.

One of the interests is "mindfulness" which really confused me. I figured it had to mean more than just "thinking a lot" because that is way too cringe to be one of the options. Eventually I figured it must be something spirituality related just because that kind of stuff is also well-represented in the choice of interest options.

When did "mindfulness" become a shibboleth?

When did "mindfulness" become a shibboleth?

I think it appeals to a range of groups: it avoids the financial and medical problems of anti-depressants etc., while also not requiring practitioners to confront their self-defeating thoughts and behaviours. As an approach to stress, anxiety, depression etc., it thus has the "benefits" of exercise and other methods that (I think) seem to work primarily through distraction rather than resolving cognitive problems. And it distills what Westerners usually like to think that the East is about:

It's like a tear in the hands of a western man

Tell you about salt, carbon and water

But a tear to a Chinese man

Will tell you about sadness and sorrow or the love of a man and a woman

(Jefferson Starship, "Ride the Tiger")

Spiritual, but without the burdens of actually and definitely believing in spirits, miracles, and all the other things that everyday Buddhists in the actual East have told me are the key features of Buddhism. No, it's really about living in the moment and finding yourself - a low cost American road trip, with incense.

Less cynically, it seems to have also become a term for engaged, purposeful, focused ways of living, which are probably conducive towards happiness.

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