It seemed like such a good idea – spending three years, three months and three days in a Buddhist retreat seven thousand feet up an Arizona mountain, living in rustic conditions and meditating silently, with a charismatic Princeton-educated monk for a “spiritual leader,” in order to “employ yoga and deep meditation to try to answer some of life’s most profound questions.”
Wait, what?
How would yoga and deep meditation enable anyone to answer some of life’s most profound questions? Unless, I suppose, some of those questions have to do with how boring it would be to spend three years, three months and three days meditating silently, no matter how charismatic one’s Princeton-educated spiritual leader is.
Erik Brinkman, a Buddhist monk who remains one of Mr. Roach’s staunchest admirers, said, “If the definition of a cult is to follow our spiritual leader into the desert, then we are a cult.”
Yes, that’s one pretty good definition of a cult. Following spiritual leaders into the desert has “cult” written all over it. Pro tip: it’s because of the following, and the spiritual leader, and the desert.
From the article:
You know, I think there is a real problem with what I perceive to be a common emphasis in Buddhist-style meditation and practice: the attempt to give up all attachments, cease thinking, stop analyzing, disconnect boundaries, lose ego, let go of self, and just blend into some sort of cosmic stream of complete acceptance of whatever happens. For one thing, you end up getting people who are very, very easy to lead and exploit. As in this story.
And I’m not all that sure that this relaxed state of bliss is really worthwhile. I have a friend who is studying and, apparently, teaching Buddhism and once, after listening to her wax eloquent about how peaceful mindlessness was, I told her that it sounded like she would look forward to the end stages of Alzheimer’s. She thought about it a bit, and then agreed. Yes, that might not b e too bad That might be the sort of elevated level of ‘letting go’ which would liberate us from our resentments and judgements.
Creepy.
I thought at the time that she did seem a bit bothered by the ‘insight,’ though.
Now hold on, I’ll follow a leader to a good Thai restaurant.
Why is it the deep, profound questions never actually lead to deep profound answers? Whenever I hear gurus say deepprofound things it always sounds like it could be coming from a random wisdom generator. Also, when you hear the word “mindful”, run like hell.
Sastra, I’ve kind of always seen it that way, which is probably why I’ve never gotten into it, but all the same, I think if it’s a temporary state (and if the person doing it doesn’t actually want to become soup-brained), it can probably be good.
Actually I heard – on the radio – someone recently explaining that it actually teaches you to use your mind better – I think because it trains you in the ability to focus quickly and thoroughly. It trains you to shut off peripheral stuff.
And yes about the profound answers. Yeah right some people meditating in silence for three years and three months is really going to produce “answers” to “profound questions.” Get off my fucking lawn.
‘It seemed like such a good idea – spending three years, three months and three days in a Buddhist retreat seven thousand feet up an Arizona mountain, living in rustic conditions and meditating silently,’
It’s a pity more believers don’t do this for longer- why not three decades, three years, three months and three days? The rest of us would have some peace.
Aren’t there (1) more cosmic radiation (2) less oxygen and (3) fluoride naturally occurring in the water (maybe arsenic too) there? That might have some effect.
Ernie, “mindfulness” is a technique which has clinical backing. Sounds like woo, and there are woo-meisters who bandy it about, but it has been shown to be quite useful. I know this is just anecdotal, but it helps me get through bouts of anxiety and depression at times.
I once spent 10 days on a Scotish island which has been taken over by Buddhists.
Most of the monks and nuns were ok – but the groupies were insufferable. I’ve never met a more snobbish, self-regarding woo-ridden group of people in my life.
I can readily believe that three plus years of navel contemplation could result in an over-contemplated navel.
I vote for a change of terms. From mindfullness to mindlessness.
Argh. I used up an allotted New York Times article.
My big problem with yoga and meditation is that it’s portrayed as a way of thinking as opposed to a perhaps useful set of techniques to achieve certain modest benefits to health, relief of stress etc. The big sell as a quasi-religion makes the whole thing unpalatable to me, a minor loss I suppose.
I think the “profound answers” or realizations involved in some more reasonable Buddhist practice are only really profound for people who are mostly ignorant or had been locked into a previous narrow mindset of narcissism and violence. I think such meditative practices were actually meant to surprise you out of magical thinking and into critical thinking of a sort. Like Zen koans where the answer is mu (which is sort of equivalent to lolwut?) – one is supposed to realize the the question is silly, fallacious, meaningless, and not connected to reality at all.
Unfortunately, mind training of any sort, tainted by religious tendencies, makes for a crappy mixed bag.
Maybe that’s what they’ll come up with at the end of the three years months and days – lolwut?
Works for me.
Oh yes. QFT. It bugged me when Sam Harris made statements to that effect in support of meditation.
About Zen Buddhism, I can recommend Zen in the Art of Archery (the audiobook works too). The author Eugen Herrigel was a German philosopher who went to Japan to learn Zen as a philosophy. They told him Zen was a philosophy he couldn’t learn by reading alone, and he would need to learn in the context of some practice, and he chose archery.
I can read the book consistent with naturalism, if you can agree that some knowledge is private and nonverbal, with a barrier of transmission to another person, as I commented here. Tom Clark has rules for epistemology that include private knowledge if you include testing that the public can witness. In The Matrix, when Neo opens his eyes and claims, “I know Kung-Fu,” Morpheus replies, “Show me.” Epistemology can include that, and still challenge a person who says they know a god exists, and what a god wants.
About this 3-year retreat gone wrong, ABC’s Nightline ran a piece that helped me see what happened. ABC’s links depend on your browser being mobile or not, so I’ll let the curious search for it.
I would add a joke about Jonestown, but the punch line is too long.
You are not your mind. Who is aware of these thoughts? Consciousness simply doesn’t reduce to information.
IIUC, there is not a single, discrete “self” in there who is the aware one. There are parts of the brain processing information on different levels simultaneously and other parts putting it together and another part forming a coherent picture that makes sense to us out of it all.
Well, information, perceptions, memories…yes, it kind of does. But it doesn’t reduce to a simplistic,straightforward “impression received>conscious self perceives.”
(I get from Susan Blackmore that Buddhism actually can lead to the insight that you are your mind and there is no “self” [in the naive sense] there, which seems to be where consciousness studies point as well. But the study of consciousness is in its infancy.)
Consciousness has been studied intensively, systematically, and entirely empirically, for many thousands of years. There is an extensive body of literature reporting the findings, and if allowance is made for different cultures, eras, and languages, then the results are remarkably coherent. Of course, this is almost universally misunderstood, and routinely conflated with philosophy or religion.
It takes many years to get a real science education, so few people can be bothered. It takes even longer to develop an authentic understanding of your own nature, so even fewer people take the trouble.
Vijen, …no. For the vast majority of that “thousands of years”, the scientific method was considered the discredited and eccentric attitude of a few quacks. (That is if we can even agree to say that it existed at all. Modern science has many specific elements that you won’t find in the ancient past, including falsifiability, blind tests, and peer review.) We had people claiming tautologies like “I think, therefore I am” as the greatest achievements of reason. Actual empirical study into consciousness and how it works is still very much a new phenomenon. It’s a tough nut to crack, for sure, but we’re well beyond the point of thinking that consciousness is anything more than a series of intersecting and co-functioning physical processes.
If you don’t understand why “consciousness is not just information” is part of the problematic misunderstanding of the issue itself, rather than a solution, I would suggest you read the criticisms of John Searle’s Chinese Room. It’s a classic philosophical thought experiment, and the answers (of which there are many) show comprehensively how a process as complicated as consciousness can be reduced to mere parts.