Yes. This is critical so we can know whether those Thai monks who sleep 3-4 hours a night are wrecking their brain. Or if their long meditation sessions can make up for the lost sleep.
There is actually a decent book written on this subject Altered Traits. It starts pointing out that there are thousands of studies on meditation, but many of them are pretty poor quality, lack controls, etc. so they only discuss the ones worth studying.
I hope we can get to the point of social pushback on the word "meditation" as far too vague. There are so many different kinds, and some take completely contradictory approaches. For example, existentialist "now"-based sensory meditation vs. visualization-based meditation. And that's just one of many dichotomies.
Not that I object to meditation by a long shot--it's just such rich world of alternatives and people deserve to know about that.
At this point I see it as the mental equivalent of "exercise". There's so many different kinds of exercise, for many different goals. The same thing goes for mediation
> At this point I see it as the mental equivalent of "exercise".
Is it though? We can at least all agree on the definition of exercise, not so with meditation. Without a common definition, I'm not sure what kind of empirical claims can be made about meditation.
I'd say by any definition of "We can at least all agree on a definition" that I'd accept, we can either all agree on the definition of both or neither.
If both, we're discussing this in a context that prefers practicality and meaningful discourse. If neither, we're discussing in a context that prefers pedantry and academic hogwash. Otherwise, if one but not the other, maybe we're getting the worst of both worlds ️
> I'd say by any definition of "We can at least all agree on a definition" that I'd accept, we can either all agree on the definition of both or neither.
It's a turn of phrase, I don't mean that literally all people will always agree on the definition of the word, I mean, practically speaking, outside of "pedantry" and "academic hogwash". I mean the scientific definition with empirical outcomes.
99.9% of people will consider something done to specifically raise your heart rate or strain your muscles as exercise. That 0.1% is just for the HN contrarian who will invent a different understanding that nobody has.
Meditation is completely nebulous, ranging from sitting down indian-style for 15 minutes to pseudoscience chakra bullshit that induces euphoria and cures diseases.
When people say they are going to exercise, you know what they are going to do. When they say they're going to meditate, it really could be anything. It is a real suitcase word.
I don't find this all that persuasive. For one, I'm not convinced that "pseudoscience chakra bullshit" isn't meditation, even though it obviously doesn't work the way those people say it does. There are also people who view exercise in an unscientific way or believe it will have unrealistic benefits, but that doesn't make exercise nebulous. To my understanding, we have done brain imaging on meditators and can see that the practice is reflected the brain, so just like you'd define exercise as something that strains a muscle, you might define meditation as something that induces a meditative brain state.
I think you might be confusing lack of visibility, or difficulty of measurement, with indefinability.
I think the real issue is that exercise, being a physical thing is much easier to observe and parameterize.
How many miles do you run on a flat treadmill? How high of Heart BPM? How much does the individual weigh? What movement is done, for how many reps and what weight?
Now how does one parameterize the intensity/duration of a meditation session? And does it, like exercise, depend on the existing adaptations of the individual?
It's at least not as wide varied as "One type of exercise is lying perfectly still in bed" and "Another is sprinting and lifting weights".
To me, that's the range of definitions that meditation has. I have heard that meditation should be thinking of nothing, I have heard that meditation should be reflection on the past, I have heard that meditation should be free-form thinking, or focused on the present.
This range is, to me, roughly equivalent to "meditation is basically anything, usually (but not always) involving some quite though process".
Here's the dictionary definition I think is relevant to the discussion:
bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness
So video games and scary movies wouldn't count whereas sit-ups and push-ups would. Science can tell us the types of "bodily exertion" that contribute to "developing and maintaining physical fitness", that's how we can know what counts and what doesn't.
> Can you make empirical claims about exercise when one person is deadlifting 350lbs and the other is running 10 miles a day?
>bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness
I don't think I agree with that definition of exercise.
Bodily exertion for any other sake (running from a wild animal, from a threatening person, towards an individual in need of help etc) is still exercise. There is not a requirement that it must be for the sake of developing fitness.
>If you control for diet you absolutely can.
Well, no, that's not quite true.
From my examples above, distance running is a form of cardiovascular exercise which has benefits such as stimulating the release of chemicals like BDNF, which tend have positive neurological effects. There are, obviously, also significant cardiovascular benefits - increased VO2 max, lower resting heartrate, etc.
On the other hand, deadlifting heavy weights results in major growth of the musculoskeletal system, bone density, and other benefits, but causes little benefit to cardiovasculr or neurological function.
Cardio and strength training are two entirely different beasts in the types of empirical claims you can make about the benefits they bring.
> I don't think I agree with that definition of exercise.
I don't see a compelling reason to dispense with a dictionary definition
> There is not a requirement that it must be for the sake of developing fitness.
It's not an exhaustive definition, but it is practical one, it's also unambiguous in its meaning, and applies to discussions about medical outcomes. Escaping from a wild animal is technically exercise but it's not really what the word is meant to convey. If you spent a day in the woods escaping from a wild bear, when you arrived home and someone asked you "what did you do today", you wouldn't say "I was out exercising" because that's just not how the word is used.
> Well, no, that's not quite true.
Yes it is true. We could make predictions about weight and muscle mass over time.
That's like saying "Exercise should be embraced and not sublabelled". Imagine just telling people "exercise" and them having no idea whether they should lift weights, run, swim, or stretch. "Meditation" is a vague hazy concept to most of the population that have no idea how to get started or what the benefits are. So, imo, you are absolutely wrong. It should definitely be broken up.
edit: Me being one of them. I have a hazy understanding of focal meditation (whether breath, clock ticking, whatever) and what it's supposed to accomplish. Other types of meditation are absolutely confusing to me. E.g. "visualization" - visualize what, for how long, how clear is it supposed to be, what are the benefits?
edit2: You are focusing on "push back", I am focusing on what the original poster said - meditation needs to be better defined.
I think people have overcomplicated meditation. At it's most basic, it's about clearing your mind and practicing keeping it clear over some interval. There are a lot of ways to do that, and lots of accessories, but they mostly have the same goal.
I really liked the way one Zen Buddhist put it: just sit. Don't think about something else, don't focus on passing thoughts, and don't push away passing thoughts, but you may observe them. The point of having a focal point (breath, a fixed point in front of you, an unfixed point) is mostly to give you something that's not distracting to focus on when you get distracted by a passing thought. That same master gave very specific guidelines on posture and whatnot, but at the same time he said to not worry about doing things wrong, they're just there to help you stay comfortable during a meditation session.
If you really want to give it a try, find a comfy position (not laying down, you might fall asleep), focus on something (feeling of your breath, an uninteresting point in front of you, etc), and try to avoid focusing on anything else, returning to the point you picked when you inevitably fail. It's surprisingly difficult, and you immediately get goals (sit for X minutes without distractions). If you like, pick up a book (I liked Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind), or better yet, go to a class, but that's really not necessary to just get started.
> At it's most basic, it's about clearing your mind and practicing keeping it clear over some interval.
If there is one thing I have seen meditation teachers agree on, it is that meditation is not about clearing your mind. Your description of a Zen sitting practice does accommodate passing thoughts, so perhaps you mean something other than a no-thought state by a 'clear mind'?
It is sometimes possible to reach a state in which no thoughts arise for a long time (e.g. second and subsequent Jhana states) but that is quite rare for most meditators.
Well pushback is a negative or unfavourable reaction or response.
If I'm absolutely wrong you then hope meditation gets unfavourable reactions or responses? Curious why you think what most would consider a positive and healthy thing as worthy of pushback? What does meditation do to deserve this pushback?
Meditation is not immune to needing the scientific approach. We should label which types work and which don't work, so we can understand it and make it better.
That's not stopping you from doing whatever you want.
Your use of the word immune speaks to the degree which scientific concepts are applied out of context. Good luck grasping meditation concepts with an empirical approach, what will be the dependant variable? There is no point in labelling "what works" because it will be determined by who is using the technique and who is guiding them.
I think it's useful to reach conclusions like "most beginners flounder with Zen but make fast progress with Mahasi noting". But there are always exceptions and some individuals seem to benefit from less common approaches.
Sorry but no, under this guise any esoteric, homeopathic BS can gain ground. Effects of meditation, too, will have to either be objectively measurable. If they were not, it can be dismissed.
It's not medicine. Do you do null hypothesis testing after you pray? Some things just aren't objective - see psychiatry for an example of a super scientific approach to subjectivity. It still generally results in BS homeopathy that doesn't work.
the curse of causality you mean. it's hard to isolate the causes of things, but you have to do it, otherwise you don't know what works and you're drinking cow piss to prevent COVID or saying vaccines cause autism
There are three primary or classical types of meditation and most kinds of meditation bridge off of that, all with different experiences, goals, and results.
1) Concentration meditation, like breath meditation. This increases concentration and mindfulness increasing awareness so one can notice subtle details they could not before, most notably the causal relationship within mental states.
2) Insight meditation, like noting meditation. These kinds of meditation are used with the teachings to get enlightened, but ones mindfulness and awareness must be high before being able to yield any fruit.
3) Metta meditation. It's where you wish for good things to yourself and others. This can help cultivate positive psychological states like metta (loving kindness) and compassion.
4) Zazen, which is technically a kind of concentration meditation, is a kind of meditation where you copy the posture of the teacher in front of you mirroring their movements rounding out breathing patterns and what not. It's often a do for nothing good for nothings meditation.
You may find "Twenty Five Doors to Meditation: Handbook for Entering Samadhi" by Bodri interesting.
Most people don't meditate correctly or go deeply enough to enter the breathless state. A lot of the popular teachers of mindfulness meditation (Kabat-Zinn, etc) never mention what happens when you allow your body to become totally still and ignore sensory input (or even that you should). Yet this leads to the Taoist's Original Breath, or Patanjali's spontaneous Kumbhaka, where the breath naturally suspends for long periods of time, and is really the doorway to deep meditation.
Sorry for people wanting medical science here - materialistic science has inherent limitations when trying to deal with subjective experiences such as the nature of consciousness itself. You'd have to convince yourself if you were interested that the states reached by e.g. intent concentration on the breath is experientially very similar to those arrived at by other methods.
BTW: I can see from your comment you've either never practiced Zazen, have no experience of it or have had a charlatan teacher.
:D during metta meditation, don't you radiate metta, and then when you notice you are distracted, you come back to radiating metta?
also it just might be that you think it is about practicing a secondary emotion (because it makes sense right now), but actually it is an indirect way of making you practice something else.
Different types of meditation actually have very different outcomes. This is well researched. If you want to dive into the topic, I can recommend the book "Altered Traits".
Yes, you tend to live a healthier life when you aren’t subject to extreme stress, or at least are able to use a medium to mitigate it. Meditation is one medium, one which I believed to be overhyped (but I guess it works for many)
I prefer playing musical instruments, but there’s no studies claiming a link between playing music and slowing down aging. It doesn’t sell much into the “bio hacking” agenda.
I practice Buddhism. The primary practice of the sect I follow is to chant.
When I chant, I feel better mentally. I have seen others do the same.
I doubt that a scientific study has been done on this. I have no idea how you could do that and control all the variables.
It's something anyone who wants to can try, though you can only go so far without a teacher and some kind of community. And if you live in a country where religious freedom is limited, there would also be challenges.
Also, it hardly establishes any causation between meditation and reduced brain aging.
They compared a monk to average people. Meditation is hardly the only substantial difference between the lives of these people. Monks have very different diets as well, just to name one thing.
Unfortunately there is no take away without further research. Is the threshold meditating 20 mins a day, 2 hours, 8 hours? Is it gradual? Is he an outlier? Is it related to sitting around in nature and doing nothing all day?
I have been meditating for over a decade now. Started when I messed with lucid dreaming as a teenager. I am still unconvinced there is any benefit to it whatsoever, at least to a person who otherwise focuses on their work for large periods of time.
Kelly McGonigal from Stanford or Harvard argues that it increases willpower, but so does just doing things.
There was a study showing Transcendental meditation decreases blood pressure, but Transcendental meditation is a gimmick and the study was funded by the people pushing the system, etc.
All the Harvard studies about core temperature increases show that the monks are actively contracting their muscles to achieve the effect. Same story with slowing down heart-rate. Neither of which ever achieves out-of-norm ranges.
The goal is the "heart's sure release"
Just sitting still and quietly will calm the mind, but without penetrative insight into the nature of reality, we are beading up on the pyrex sheet of reality instead of coming to know what is common to all. Essentially, there are a lot of habitual patterns of grasping and aversion (mainly grasping) that keep Awareness tethered to the mortal coil and also tethered to a lot of cramped psychic space.
While I have not tried Transcendental Meditation, I do have some knowledge of the fundamental notions of Buddha's teaching and would say that meditating on compassion over and over again until you weep for all sentient beings is essential to eliminating the hard shell of the intellect that keeps us from being receptive and sensitive to the abiding nature of reality.
In a similar way, you can consider one mushroom and its limited awareness of the forest. If the mushroom were to contemplate a compassionate wish for other mushrooms, the identity-difference would dissolve and the mushroom could become aware of the whole forest floor. Just a simple metaphor, but perhaps the image is clear.
Meditating can sharpen your focus, but meditation cannot take you all the way there without knowledge of the way things are in a phenomenological sense.
So if you need a recommended regimen, start with compassion and when your compassion is strong ponder identitylessness and interdependence.
Pray to find the perfect resources and they will find you.
The source is the fact that it's taught by a pyramid-scheme group of teachers who teach you "special secret phrases."
edit: Editing because I really do want to understand - the mantras serve no purpose as far as I can tell. There is no reason why you can't focus on "I am a good boy today" rather than something in Hindi. It's just a chant, and trying to teach a "special personalized" chant and charge for it as dishonest.
edit 2 to reply to the post below (can't post so much in one thread): Sure, it's not a source, but it explains the logic of why it's a gimmick.
edit 3: @sol: And this makes some sort of sense to you? You claim to understand the mechanism behind this or that someone who made up a random phrase for money does?
Based on your tone, it sounds like you've already made up your mind. But in the case that you're asking in good faith: the idea behind the mantras is that it is a meaningless sound that preoccupies the language part of your brain without giving it an actual concept to think about. When you repeat and focus on the mantra in this way, the process of meditation feels more like falling asleep (this is what they mean when they say "effortless"). I found this technique far easier and more effective than any other type of mediation. There is no reason you could not look up a mantra (or come up with your own) and practice this technique for free.
TM does charge a fee, which I found reasonable for 90 minutes of 1-on-1 instruction, 4 evenings of classes, and lifetime access to any TM center worldwide. They also have a sliding scale and many opportunities for scholarships. They will tell you that 1-on-1 instruction is integral to the learning process. I did mindfulness meditation for 3 years before switching to TM, and the value I got from the instruction was to simplify my natural tendency to over-complicate these processes (don't think, do). The instruction was absolutely necessary for me, but it very likely would not be necessary for a subset of people.
I understand the inclination to dismiss it as a pyramid scheme or a cult, as the latter was my hangup to trying TM sooner. My opinion: if it is a cult, then it's a bottom-up cult (in that the source of its cult-ness is the obsession of the followers, rather than as the intent from the top). This is very similar to my experience at a Tony Robbins 4 day event; the two days with Robbins were life-changing and _phenomenal_, but the days without him were so bad that I walked out. I tried talking to other attendees about the qualitative difference, but literally nobody was having it, and some of them even got aggressive with me. However off-putting bad sessions and rabid followers may be, it does not change the efficacy, meaning, and power of the experience I had.
TM has a free 90-minute class that I encourage everyone to check out, once we're out of this mess.
The chants might help for people who have certain autoimmune conditions, it's a bit of vocal rehabilitation / voice therapy. Some of the mantras are tongue twisters :)
I know someone whose lupus went into remission after they started chanting, but there was one very particular chant that they found working for them.
"When asked by a student about the use of geometry, Euclid responded by giving him three obols (coins), since "he must need make gain out of what he learns."
Helps me fall asleep fast. But so does running through the relaxing individual body parts exercise. Maybe out of paranoia that I am missing something and I only do it for 10 minutes a day.
Oh, and good ideas come to me while I am trying not to focus on anything. Almost like the mind is trying to find an excuse to break single-point attention.
edit: Also, meditation traditions are found all over the world - for example a Christian mystic, Teresa of Avila meditated all the time.
edit 2 in reply to below: Sure, semantics, but you are definitely right to some degree. The difference is that the mechanism behind relaxation is clear.
