Someone who is practicing contemplation should not be held prisoner by a robot voice or a glowing screen, but instead reach an inner presence of God, and His stillness encompassing all that we experience during that sacred time.
It is absolutely necessary to shut out every distraction possible. At the same time, we acknowledge that the practitioner will be distracted in some way, not through his own fault, and we must learn the proper response to fleeting distractions. But to purposely tether yourself to a created, pagan object is to invite failure from the outset.
So, where is the problem here? Maybe you are arguing an uninformed strawman.
I could argue the same thing about going to a place of worship. You are surrounded by people (the thing that biologically distracts us the most since we crave social interactions) that make sounds or move about, plus sometimes there is a master guiding people in their practice.
Isn't that the textbook definition of distracting? Why can you magically ignore a whole drove of people around you but somehow a silenced smartphone is just too much to handle? Double standard much.
> instead reach an inner presence of God, and His stillness encompassing all that we experience during that sacred time
>pagan object
this is just baseless cultist talk
The idea of corporate worship is that the assembly is united in their purpose, there is an order observed, and the people develop discipline from this orderly worship. Also, people are not machines and that's disgusting that you draw this analogy.
People may distract, even in that situation. Many have their minds elsewhere, some don't want to be there, someone may even be actively disruptive. But corporate worship is not usually contemplative meditation.
I have been in worship sessions where silence is strictly enforced, and there is no master guiding an order of prayer. This adoration is always in a group setting. Hey, I've even used my device sometimes to look up Bible verses. It's not sterile.
But if someone is sitting at home, alone, the best practice is to shut out unnecessary distractions to the extent that it is possible. And your phone obeys its corporate master. A mobile device is not under the control of the user holding it.
Meditation is a very personal experience and strangely many people are telling eachother how it "should" be done. As if their way, which works for them personally, is the only way.
I find the direct involvement of a digital device to be somewhat unnerving and distracting. I use my Apple iPhone with my paid app about 50% of the time.
Frankly, why not just leave it out of the room? Oh, except for the app I guess.
No it isn't.
> to distract us and hold our attention. Even with a well-behaved app on it, it's still designed and configured to constantly beep and whistle and send notifications, and fly into our hand and compel us to doomscroll something unimportant.
That doesn't match my experience in over the decade of using smartphones.
> Someone who is practicing contemplation should not be held prisoner by a robot voice or a glowing screen
A smartphone is a tool.
> but instead reach an inner presence of God, and His stillness encompassing all that we experience during that sacred time.
Buddhism is non-theistic. There is no God.
> But to purposely tether yourself to a created, pagan object is to invite failure from the outset.
Is this meant as satire? I mean, pagan? Really?
This is a bold and untrue statement. There's every kind of Buddhism possible out there. Pure Land is pretty theistic…
Yes.
> have my phone tell me what to do next"
The phone is a tool. It doesn't tell me what to do.
None of which is possible for an App to do, because an App isn’t aware.
This outsourcing of basic human awareness and community to tech is quite concerning and actively harmful to our mental health IMO.
I wouldn't come to a tech site to air the counter-tech opinion and I wouldn't anticipate a fair and balanced response.
And yes, I sort of deliberately put this comment here to see how HN users react if their believes or their bussiness model are seemingly "attacked".
You can even get an EEG reader for biofeedback meditation like Muse. Works well as long as you stay away from the Deepak Chopra stuff.
I've used analogue timers to determine when to get up from my session. Please explain the difference between an analogue timer and a digital one, for this purpose.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240003927
Here's more detail about how it was tested. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/2022-apri...
Unlike all the garbage apps which ask you for subscriptions and DLCs just to play 10 minutes of audio, every single thing is free and freely downloadable. It also has customization options, a journal, a very simple and rational interface and a small corpus of advice.