While practicing concentration on a single point of focus definitely seems useful for strengthening the mind, I'm not sure that practicing a state of being completely devoid of thought is necessarily healthy. I would rather meditate on being full of thought, and thinking of many things simultaneously, or meditate on focus in a high distraction environment.
I wonder if there are meditation styles that embrace this?
For example, I might have some thoughts that are rooted in a specific desire. Perhaps I feel an urge to see what's new on Hacker News. I already did that 15 minutes ago, but so what. I'm thinking about what a great feeling it was last time I found something cool on this site. So I stop what I'm doing, navigate to Hacker News and proceed to waste 45 minutes reading through comment threads.
Of course, there's another option. I could simply ignore the desire and do something else- like whatever it is I had otherwise planned to do with that time. But this is not so easy. Chances are, I will succumb to the desire and then rationalize to myself that this is, in fact, how I planned to spend my evening the whole time.
With meditation, we practice by setting an unusual and specific intention, such as monitoring the breath. That way, if you notice yourself doing anything other than that, such as walking around, planning your weekend or replaying some event in your mind, you know that you are not doing what you intended to be doing. By returning to what you originally intended to do, you strengthen your ability to behave in an intentional manner, rather than being powerlessly yanked around by whatever idea happens to pop into your head at any given moment.
I'm not sure whether meditating for very long periods of time is healthy. But most of us struggle greatly to do it for even 10 minutes. That's because 10 minutes is longer than our attention span: even if we firmly resolve to pay attention to something for that long, we inevitably get distracted by something else within a minute or two, and completely forget what we were supposed to be doing in the first place. Don't you think that's troubling?
There are certainly parallels in other Western traditions, particularly in Sufism [2] [3]. Personally, I think that the most effective form would be the one closest to a person's tradition; ideally, meditation is a practice that's embedded in a wider setting (of legends, language, ideas).
Some more info: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitbodedut [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_meditation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muraqabah [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychasm
Imagine you wake up and spend 30 minutes on your phone before struggling out of bed, then watch TV while eating reheated leftovers for breakfast, then rush off to work because you didn't realise the time. By the time you sit down at your desk you are going to have all sorts of nonsense thoughts going around your mind and have a really hard time focussing.
Compare that to waking up, putting on calming music and making your favourite breakfast and fresh coffee, then consciously enjoying that while staring out the window at nature. After that, when you get to work you are going to much calmer.
For me, meditation allows me to be in the later state even when I don't have time or the possibility to have my day start like that. Even if you do start with the calming day, you are still going to have some nonsense thoughts, but meditation allows you to train your mind to reduce them and focus on what is important to you.
In Zen, look up 'do nothing' or 'just sitting' - I don't know the traditional language. Shinzen Young has really good content on youtube IMO.
Focusing on a single point is called 'anapana' in the vipassana tradition and is used as a way to calm the mind - like sharpening a knife - before moving on the the juicier stuff.
It's sort of paradoxical but by giving attention to every passing thought/sensation, eventually they slow down and everything becomes much calmer, quieter, and clear.
As others have noted, concentration in and of itself is not all of what meditation is. There are so many different sorts of practice traditions. In some practices there isn't an object of concentration at all, for instance in Mahamudra's teaching of samatha [2].
And you're certainly right that meditation can lead to unhealthy mental states, which is why it's important to work with a teacher or a practice tradition.
"clearing the mind", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more).
Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation.
I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state.
[1]: https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Shamatha#Shamatha_...
As powerful as that is (and backed by science), still I wonder about an alternative meditation that focuses on fullness or activity of thought.
But I subscribe to a materialist metaphysics that assumes the mind cannot truly be escaped and the benefit of meditation is to strengthen the mind and body.
From “Mindfulness” by Domyo Sater Burk © 2014 by Penguin Group (USA) isbn 978-1-61564-619-7
Expansive awareness meditation can end up getting you to the same place concentration meditation does (a still, present mind), but by using a different path…. You may find [it] works much better for you…. It just seems to depend on the way your mind works.
[Y]ou try to open your awareness to everything. Imagine you’re waiting for some unusual or miraculous event, but you don’t know which of your senses you’ll perceive it with. Will it be a sound? Will it be a sight? Will it be a thought? Whenever you find your mind has wandered, instead of bringing it back to an object, you open your awareness back up. Any time you latch on to a train of thought or a particular sensation, you’re also closing down your awareness of other things. By opening your awareness as wide as you can, you’re returning to mindfulness of the present, just as you would by turning your attention back to an object of concentration.
MINDFUL EXERCISE Sit, stand, or lie down and keep your eyes open. Widen your gaze, including what’s to the sides and above and below in your peripheral vision. (This will help keep you from getting distracted by particular things you can see.) Now watch your visual field as if it’s a movie—a slow-moving movie, perhaps, but one of those quiet, visually rich, artistic ones. Just keep watching. When you stop because you have gotten caught up in thinking, note that you have tuned out the “movie” because it’s boring, or because you think you know what’s going to happen next. Ask yourself, “When I really stop to look, is anything truly boring? Do I really know what’s going to happen next?”
But concentration meditation is not an end in itself, but generally a tool to aid in meditating on other things, including on thoughts ariaing on your mind, bodily impulses, emotion and others.
This is basically ADHD, and whilst it has its advantages, wouldn't recommend it in general.
The extreme of this might be psychedelics. A useful experience, but not necessarily something you want day to day.
Thoughts are a tool. They're like mind software.
The point of meditation isn't to stop thinking, it's to decouple yourself from them and see them from an outside perspective. In the process, perceiving that "you" are not your thoughts or your mind, and therefore direct the mind more effectively.
It's a bit like closing background processes and gaining back resources. Those thoughts take resources to 'run', and many of them are constantly spawning new ones.
When you turn your awareness on these processes, rather than them running ad hoc in the background, you can understand your self more and direct yourself better. The competing processes reintegrate.
Or perhaps it's like an unruly dog that's constantly pulling you this way or that, but you're so used to it you don't even know it's unruly. Then you start to train it, and sooner or later you become a unit, working in coordination.
Neurologically, it's likely modulating the default network, which some theorise is the neural correlate of the ego/self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
> Meditation – Structural changes in areas of the DMN such as the temporoparietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus have been found in meditation practitioners. There is reduced activation and reduced functional connectivity of the DMN in long-term practitioners. Various forms of nondirective meditation, including Transcendental Meditation and Acem Meditation, have been found to activate the DMN.
I used to have a coworker who would work while listening to stuff like Aphex Twin specifically to exercise his ability to focus. Personally my programming output would suffer but I think there's something to the exercise.
So it does nothing (likely), it's good for you, or it's bad for you. There is nothing saying that single-point focus doesn't just kill lateral thinking. It's not like it's working memory training or anything of the sort.
Before you downvote me - ask yourself if you really know of any PROVEN benefit of meditation.
I used to do a lot of "one pointed" meditation. Then I did one pointed + vipassana. Now I do just vipassana.
>I speak from personal experience
lol
Merely putting problems to sleep for a while or trying to forcibly suppress strong emotions will not help either. You are just keeping a time bomb ticking somewhere in a corner of your mind.
True meditation, however, is not just taking a break. It is not simply closing one’s eyes to the problem for a while. Meditation goes to the root of the problem. You need to become aware of the destructive aspect of compulsive attachment and all of the conflictive mental states that you mentioned. They are destructive in the sense of undermining your happiness and that of others, and to counteract them you need more than just a calming pill. Meditation practice offers many kinds of antidotes. "
Personally I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations which was already leading me to bad outcomes.
For a long time, I, too, thought accepting Something Bad meant forcing oneself to appreciate it somehow, to reframe it as actually good, or to lie to oneself or even to "approve" of it. Just to re-iterate: those would all be unproductive, or Wrong Action, or just "bad."
Instead, accepting means allowing one's self to acknowledge something happened without it driving thought to somewhere else. E.g. I was assaulted by a neighbor recently... true story... I was very traumatized for a few weeks and unable to process it well. As I slowly gathered myself up, I began to accept it. It doesn't mean I approve of it or welcome it or anything like that. I still hate the motherfucker and I'm disturbed that justice will never come for him, except hopefully he will fuck over the wrong person who is unlike me a scary person, and he'll get what he has coming.
But you see how I digressed there, moving out of the present and away from the fact, moving toward a fantasy? That part is not acceptance, either. For me, acceptance is simply being able to sit still and say, "yes, my neighbor injured me for life."
And to sit. and wait. and abide. and feel those urges to get mad and perhaps to get mad, but not to lose focus. When we get mad and lose focus, our minds confuse the negative feelings with our surroundings. I need to train my mind to connect the anger with what he did - not my current, comfy surroundings with a 43" 4k monitor and cool can of cranberry lime seltzer.
We do this because magic happens. when we simply sit with it, our mind begins to actually process it. It's an organic version of a mechanistic process that you don't have to consciously run, but you can almost consciously obbserve. I like to imagine a fleet of trucks in a warehouse. They are carrying the heavy load of the trauma or upset in them and they need to bring it to the right departments in the brain to chop it up, water it down, separate it, dissolve, and re-fabricate it into something new. This is an automatic process our minds have apparently evolved. And it's free!
But it requires some squirminess, some patience, some willingness to temporarily feel discomfort while sitting here, feeling the pain in my lower back, coming to terms with it. not appreciating it, but become capable of sitting with it.
So I urge GP to circle back and consider this way of accepting, rather than someone telling you you should appreciate or thank the pain or some kind of bullshit like that. This doesn't correct or justify and evil. All this does is remove my own excess reaction to it so I can bring myself to peace by not flipping out when I inevitably recall it.
Please accept my compassion for whatever your circumstances were and consider the advice of the late Thich Nhat Hanh to sit still and take it in. Let the delivery tracks in your mind do their processing and you will feel it settle and your mind will allow you to function better again.
> The antidote is to be aware of desire or anger, instead of identifying with it.
The general idea is to develop a sort of recursive awareness. In your case, it seems like there was a problematic situation that you were struggling with, and that once you became aware of shifts of perspective as a tool for actionable-ness, you attempted to do the "opposite" of struggling (accepting uncontrollable things as inevitable). But now your awareness extends to being able to see that neither of those options are necessarily the two polar extremes of the spectrum of choices you have.
One aspect that kinda rubs me the wrong way when people talk about mindfulness is this idea that things can just magically fall into place. I think it downplays the difference between being aware of something and the effort it takes to do something about it. I tend to think of mindfulness in terms of turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns. The former isn't actionable because you're not even aware of it. The latter is actionable in some way, but the exact way to go about it may not necessarily be obvious or easy.
I like that and somewhat agree. It's not that some mystical force makes life easier for you because of your merit, it's just that you have a much greater awareness and comfort of your own ignorance. So it's not a surprise when that ignorance is revealed by the situations of life in stark ways, and you can more calmly respond to them than if you were otherwise triggered by them in an identified way.
I'll give you one example from my own practice. When I learned the Mahasi style of vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, which has you note sense objects as they arise, I noted everything, including conversation. I noted "hearing, hearing, hearing" as I'd listen to the story of my elocutor. This brought me no closer to awakening! The act of hearing and awareness of hearing is so very far from understanding the content of conversation.
Small misunderstandings like these lead to big consequences.
"What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see."
Abstruse and subtle! Difficult to discern. Difficult for anyone, even monks in their monastic redoubts.
The first time I did a noting type practice (way before doing the Mahasi style of noting) I became nearly instantly depressed and disassociated. Noting is, for me, a very agitating practice. If someone is reading this, this doesn't mean Mahasi is a 'bad' technique. But you may want to steady yourself in a shamatha practice before considering noting.
If we look at the suttas, the Satipatthana Sutta, or Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness, offers a recipe to remain mindful of the sense aggregates to achieve insight:
"In this way he remains focused internally on the body in & of itself, or externally on the body in & of itself, or both internally & externally on the body in & of itself. Or he remains focused on the phenomenon of origination with regard to the body, on the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the body, or on the phenomenon of origination & passing away with regard to the body. Or his mindfulness that 'There is a body' is maintained to the extent of knowledge & remembrance. And he remains independent, unsustained by (not clinging to) anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on the body in & of itself."
"Mindfulness of a thing" means samatha. "Just mindfulness" means vipassana. Sometimes they combine both and call the whole program "vipassana"...
Messy and inconsistent.
I like the terms "concentration" and "growing".
For me phrases like "gently staying with" or "quietly attending to" or even "remembering" (which is sort of what sati means anyway) work better than "concentration", but it seems like there isn't a perfect piece of terminology to describe the kind of effort/effortlessness balance that has to be achieved for samatha to work. But I feel that "letting go of distractions" is a better way around it than "concentrating one-pointedly" which tends to sound very effortful.
Mindfulness/vipassana/insight, I have no idea what a good phrase is. There are so many modifications of insight techniques that it's hard to find a common core sometimes.
That said, I believe the early Buddhist texts (i.e. the suttas) don't really make the samatha/vipassana distinction much if at all, this is a (relatively) recent development. And it seems like practicing one necessarily invokes some of the other (apart from during very refined states of samatha where there's no "bandwidth" for the kind of analysis and noting that happens in most insight techniques). I've often thought of vipassana practice as "applying the principles/mechanics of samatha to (xyz mental noting technique)", which might be why some traditions tend to have you do some form of samatha first before vipassana - because the mind needs a little training in being steady and dropping distractions before it can apply a vipassana technique in a (roughly) one-pointed way.
When I do the second one, I watch sensations come and go while refraining from moving my awareness in reaction to what I observe.
Is that what you do?
In these western teachings and in the theravadan writings, usually insight is contrasted with "concentration", which is `samatha`, which is a kind of effortless concentration on one thing. Focusing solely on the sensations of the breath at a point in your body is one way of doing samatha, or imagining a complex mental image (of, say, a mandala) or a simple image like a white circle. This kind of meditation is about dropping your attachment to everything except this one thing, which creates a strong attachment to that thing to the exclusion of all else, and this is often pleasurable because you're both strongly mentally attached to that sensation and it's a sensation that keeps happening at high "volume", which is very rewarding. With this you can enter states called `jhana` (which is actually pretty much the only word in early buddhism for "meditation", and through the spread of Buddhism, linguistically became "chan" in China, "zen" in Japan, and "seon" in Korea, "thien" in Vietnam...)
The reason that they are contrasted is because mindfulness practices tend to go the other way and include a larger scope of what you are including in your attention, for example mentally labelling what senses are being activated from moment to moment, or the sensations of the body/breath in a more wholesome way without blocking out external stimuli, but developing very strong clarity on the momentary aspects of those sensations and experiences, sort of applying a "samatha" style concentration to analysing the sensations as the "three core features" you described.
Both the approaches tend to suppress the "hindrances" in the mind that prevent jhana and insight. These are recurring thoughts and emotions that trouble you and stop this kind of mental configuration from happening in a stable way. The techniques use up mental and perceptual "bandwidth" in holding the mind in a way so that attention/awareness and holding on/letting go are balanced on whatever the object of meditation is. By developing samatha or sati, or a some of both mixed together, you can enter interesting and unusual states of consciousness that are pleasant, weird, intriguing, peaceful- that can be used as a point of inquiry into why the mind is grasping at things in certain ways and what the result of that grasping is doing to it.
Actually the insight of vipassana is pretty consistent in being other-reflective and not "self"-reflective. It's concentrating on mental states as they happen, and realizing that a mental state can never be truly "about" itself, but at most it can relate to the fleeting memory of a former mental state. Since there is thus no such thing as actual "self"-reflection, the next insight is that mental perceptions, at their most basic level, do not in fact evidence any continuity and distinct identity of the "self" - which is of course the core "insight" of anatta!
I'd be curious how this view is justified.
>I did a mindfulness practice for a while that I thought was harmful because it encouraged me to accept unacceptable situations
I've never heard of this being part of mindfulness, unless said unacceptable situations were entirely beyond your control.
[^0]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...