Quick thoughts once again. On Tuesday, about Tuesday.
Meditation is hard when you're tired, as I learned this morning after two nights of a mere 6 hrs of sleep. That's the reason that I'm going to just get this post out there in the waves, so that I can sleep tonight! Also tomorrow is a full day of silence so I will be sans screen and I want to go ahead and check one thing off the mental, monkey-mind to-do list.
Basic take-away messages from today. Buddhism as many of us know it in the west is actually a modern incarnation (pun intended). This doesn't make it any less "real" than the traditional versions of the religion as practiced by laypeople in Buddhist countries, but the emphasis on person meditation practices is really modern! This blew my mind. The presenter, David McMahan, gave a clear and understandable overview of such a difficult topic. The second presenter was an expert on Indic philosophies. .... There was a panel discussion that was one of my favorite things so far. A Christian, a yogi, and four buddhists on a stage. Sounds like the beginning of a joke, eh? Geshe was quite adamant with his reminder to young researchers that the total number of hours of meditation (a common way to classify meditation practitioners) is not important compared to the QUALITY of meditation. So then someone asked him how to measure quality and he suggested physiological measures, like goosebumps. This got a laugh but he was quite serious about the physical response to deep states of meditation. I hear at long meditation retreats many people experience great warmth etc. Would love to hear about your physical reactions to deep meditation. In the a panel discussion there was also thought provoking discussion about studying and using practices out of the context of where/how they were originally developed. The point was raised by our "token christian" on the panel as he calls himself jokingly, that unlike in Buddhism there is no distinction in Christianity between religion and philosophy and science. I went to a breakout session with andrew later to learn about Christian contemplative practices because there are so many Christians I know and love and I feel rather ignorant about this mainstream religion sometimes! Most of what we talked about, the "mystical" practices of visualisation and meditative/contemplative reading techniques are ancient practices associated with the catholic church. However, he said that many protestant churches now embrace them. The practice I had heard the most about is Centering Prayer which was actually developed in the 1970s as a response to the Buddhist and Hindu influences coming in from the east. I missed a yoga breakout session AND a yoga class because this topic was so interesting so this is one i would especially like to talk about to anyone interested in person! Phew. Unedited thoughts might not be very useful for you but that was surprisingly good for me. Would love to hear any questions or thoughts you might like to share. Will post again Thursday about my experience with silence tomorrow!
I have a friend I worked with that is a Buddhist. He grew up Catholic and then when he reached high school he began practicing Buddhism. In explaining his beliefs to me, he told me the most devout Buddhist he ever knew was a Christian Missionary. Pretty Zen huh? He went on to explain the four tenets of Buddhism. As he spoke I understood what he meant. In the vaguest sense I agreed with him. It was only when we got to the details that our beliefs diverged. But isn't that true of most things?
ReplyDeleteI would be interested in knowing your parents' thoughts about your choice of beliefs. Your father told me long ago that when he was in high school he decided to attend church on his own. What kept him from continuing to go, and ultimately join, was the hypocrisy he saw in the members. It is what I love about your father... his honor. (If you tell him I said that I will kill you) He is a man that pretty much does what he says. Kind of a "What You See Is What You Get". I see that in you mother too. They are people of integrity.
its seems that with many biometric measures of meditation quality, there would be the possibility of training for the test. Some individual might train in a manner which has this person, consciously or not, meditating with the effect of affect a biological system. Any test looking at measures of that system would presumably be measuring both quality and how much "practice" the person had for the particular biometrics used in the evaluation. Consequently, numerical measures of quality would almost certainly suffer from endogeneity and biasedness. Hours spent meditating sounds pretty compelling to me.
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