Meditation and Vipassana is not magic!

I do not quite like it when people refer to meditation as "new age bullshit", or accuse people who say it works of magical thinking.

When you go to a doctor, he prescribes you pills, and you believe that those pills will work. Why do you believe it? Because one person - the doctor - said so? Because there was a research done that proves that those pills work? Who told you there was a research done? People on the Internet? And you believe them? Why? Is it about sufficient amount of people before you start believing? Why don't you then become a Muslim or Christian - is there not a sufficient amount of religious people around? Or is it maybe about what the most people around you believe in?

I say until you study medicine and do the research yourself, all you can do is magical thinking that goes like this: "for some reason it works even though I don't know why". Then why is a person who says "I don't know why meditation works but it works" is accused of magical thinking and being silly?

In the end there is nothing mystical or magical in how meditation works. The basic technique of focusing on your breath - is simply an exercise drill in the ability to focus. It's focus training, nothing else! And it is not exercising staying focus, it is exercising bringing the focus back, and not understanding it is why many people give up on meditation thinking that they cannot stay without thoughts running through their head. Almost no one can. When you do muscle training you do not progress by trying to keep them flexed for maximum amount of time, you usually train them by doing repetitions. This is what the moment of bringing the focus back is - a repetition. The more times you bring the focus back, the better you become at it. The easier and faster you bring the focus back to what you are doing in your life, the more of your life you will spend in a focused state. And it goes without saying that a living in a focused state makes your life better.

Why focus on the breath, not something else - breath is the only thing in our body that we can do both voluntarily and involuntarily - you can control you breath, but when you stop you will not stop breathing, the body will take over. Therefore focusing on breath is especially efficient as it makes you constantly balance between two polarities: you do not want to go into doing mode and focus on controlling your breath, at the same time you don't want to go into watching mode where you space out like in front of the TV and start thinking about something else. It's simply tricky enough, and as a bonus it forces you to make some contact with your body (more about it below). And your breath is always with you, you can use it any time.

And now about how Vipassana works, the technique that comes from Buddha. Religion aside, the 10 day courses of Vipassana are nothing more than putting you in a very extreme and difficult prolonged situation (similar to a prison), where yes it is fucking hard to fulfill the expectations you had towards yourself when you joined. It's a set up for a failure. And of course in that hard situations everyone will freak out, and everyone will freak out in their specific ways, and of course it is your personal stuff that you would rather not deal with that will come up. And since you are not allowed to interact with people there, you are not allowed to read or write, you are not allowed to use any distractions, you are forced to actually deal with your emotional shit. And since all happens in a controlled almost sterile environment, where they even feed you, it is much easier to do it than it would be in a real stressful life. That's how people go through "spiritual transformations" in those courses. This "spirituality" is nothing more than ability to look into yourself, know your shit and deal with it.

I think that the actual Vipassana technique works in different way and - just as they say in the course - it is unlikely that someone will get a real benefit from it just after 10 days. So what is Vipassana - it is a kind of body scan. As it is now known to science, there are two kinds of long term memory - the explicit memory in hippocampus - a kind of registry of past events, as well as implicit memory - that is the way your whole body has been affected by your life. People have car accidents after which their body posture changes - the trauma gets trapped in the body. So what does body scan do - it brings the awareness to what is in the body, so that again - you can deal with that shit. As a bonus, you gain more awareness of your body, which lets you know far in advance when you are about to freak out or say or do something that you would regret and gives you a possibility not to do it. Yes, our body is a part of us! Something many people forget. Emotions start in the body, not in the head. They should really teach this in school.

Now why all this religious stuff around meditation. Well, this is where it historically evolved. And I think what is the other benefit of it is that it is easier to be brave when faced with your emotional shit when you entertain the possibility that there is a higher meaning behind it, that there is an entity that wants you to do it, that will guide you. It is simply the trick to believe that you can do it before you start trying - which, as we know, is super important for the outcome.

Guilt versus abuse - completely unprofessional psychological theory

I remember the beginnings.. the moment when I went down the stairs, I was playing with my tooth that has almost completely gone out, and I was feeling.. this kind of weird-guilty mixture. As if the world became a bit darker. I remember noticing it and thinking that it is most likely just temporary mood and will soon go away.. or maybe was it was the fact that there was never enough light downstairs? - I thought. Or was it because my grandparents are old and will soon die? - I was asking myself. Or maybe it is in the end all about the tooth, because yea, it did feel a bit odd to be able to feel the bottom of the root with my tongue and suck the blood while later watching TV in my grandparents' bedroom.

But yes, what is this strange weird-guilty mixture? Isn't it the same feeling you get after someone else caused you harm? How bizarre is it to feel guilty after being abused, yet this is such a basic and universal human reaction, and it really amazes me how the world still seems not to have acknowledged it. Why do we feel the same way when someone does us bad as when we did something bad to someone? What if I challenge the concept by saying that the feeling which we call "guilt" is actually primarily felt when someone else hurts us, and we also feel it "extra" when we hurts someone else only because of empathy. Mirror neurones. Empathy allows us to feel what the other person feels after we have hurt them, which is.. guilt. Is it really not just the very same feeling on both sides of the action? Yes when you are hurt you may feel resentment, anger too - but aren't those just learned reactions? What does a small baby feel when it's abused? I think it does not feel resentment or anger, so it is likely that what it feels is: guilt. I don't mean here feeling guilty for doing something, I mean this weird feeling of feeling guilty in general, it feels a bit like having lost a part of oneself, forever. I think that as we grow, we learn tools to prevent ourselves from even getting there, we learn how to fight back, how to start an argument, how to blame, sabotage, and what not. But before that, when we are just children - we are defenceless, and - my theory is that - what we experience at young age when being abused is pure guilt.

So I was standing there, in my grandparent's hallway, feeling guilty and weird. And not, this feeling never went away since then. Slowly, over weeks, it started to change into a conviction that I must be faulty. Broken. Like, because something just literally broke. I used to be fine and then one day the world became darker, and it would never go back to how it was before.

the atheist's argument

the atheist's argument: "if me, who is thinking, concluded that there is no God, then those people who claim that there is one, must not be thinking". can you spot a logical mistake here?

i recently spoke with a friend who is atheist or agnostic (i still mix those up) and asked what would she do if her kid, raised without religion, would choose to become a member of religion. the answer is she would be fine with it, but she would not be happy about it, and consider it her failure as a mother. where is the freedom of choice here? how is this not different from what the members of a religion are constantly accused for? how is that not brainwashing?

it is not religion which is making people do bad things. it is people. people are bad, selfish and egocentric. and they want that others agree with them, no matter on which topic. this discussion about religion is like discussing color of someone's hair when they are getting behind the wheel drunk. it is simply not the point. if there was no religion people would find something else to fight over. maybe the color of the hair.

i just honestly don't care. the point is to be content with your life, without damaging the life of others. and how you do it i really don't care. and if you teach your kid to do the same that worked for you - i will say that's a very good idea, whatever it is. but don't think it's a disaster if they don't follow, if anyone doesn't follow. this is all so simple to me. am i an ignorant? if yes, then i can't even see why.

A thought about a dog that happened in a doctor's waiting room..

A dog without one leg jumping happily, why does it trigger this funny feeling inside us, something between disgust, hope, relieve and happiness.

Maybe because it means that even if something goes entirely not the way we wanted, we will still be able to be happy? And maybe we will not even remember how it could have been otherwise, as the reality in which we will end up well be the only reality we will know. Just like the dog does now.

So maybe it's also not that scary to bend your limits or accept things you were not willing to accept, or actually try to understand the other person's point of view, despite being afraid that this will change your settled views. Despite the feeling that you do something against yourself. Maybe a change, even if painful, even if at beginning it feels like we are losing or sacrificing something, maybe with time it will feel as good as before. Because we will know no other way.

Because, does it really matter which way it is? If it's the best one or second best or second worst? In the end it will be the only way I know, so why should I bother.

Recently I understood that I do not need to wait for anyone to start living the life I want to have. Just like I do not need to wait until I retire until I start travelling and enjoy my life. It's just an illusion that at some point in life I would meet some special person who would allow me to be myself and do what I want to do. First of all, almost no one ever meets such fitting person, second of all, I do not need such person to start living. Maybe now, soon at the age of 30, is the right time to actually start?

Another thing is, why have I been stopping myself from being myself until now? In many things most of the people I find so different from me and at the same time so alike (similar to reach other), that in some strange way I assumed that everyone is forcing themselves to be who they are - and I  tried to do the same. But, the heck, why? I still don't know how many people are actually forcing themselves and how many just are who they are, but that's not relevant, what is relevant is that I don't have to be like the most of the people. Understanding the meaning of these trivial words gives me so much power, so much inner motivation, and so much of the feeling of happiness.

What is logic

It is not the first time I thought of that, but I just wanted to put it down in words here. This also touches the subject of God, and the question I have been asked by a friend who claimed himself as changing from catholic to atheist: "If God claims that I have free will, and at the same time he knows my future and whether I am going to heaven to to hell, where is the free will? Doesn't it make it sound illogical? And why should I bother, if it is already known whether I will be saved or not?!".

I used to think about it from time to time later.

I also remember one day at a maths lecture the prof drew a coordinate system, then drew a point, and then he asked "If I draw a line now, the line is infinite, right? But does the fact that it is infinite mean that it will touch the point?", and then he drew the line next to the the point, in the way that it was not touching it. It immediately made me rethink my theory that I had back then: "if the universe is infinite, there must be aliens *somewhere*". As by analogy to the simple picture I just had in front of me, the universe being infinite does not have to imply that it contains anything that I am currently thinking of.

Another funny visualisation illustrating a similar thought goes like this: imagine a world of two dimensional creatures living on a plane. They know only two dimensions: width and length. Then imagine a cone moving through the plane. The creatures will see a circle or an oval, getting bigger and bigger (or smaller and smaller), which finally dissapears. They will not be able to explain what just happened.

What if God is something analogical to us looking at the two dimensional plane form a three dimensional world? What if what he sees is that "plane" of our lives, of the whole world, of the choices of the dynamics, he sees it in one single "moment", snapshot, as the time is also part of that plane. In this way he can "know" what is going to happen with every single soul, but also every being on Earth still has the choice. Well, that's just a hypothesis, and it is not so important whether it could be valid or not, or if God exists or not, but only trying to imagine such concept brings me to the somehow obvious conclusion:

The logic as we know it: the yes and no logic, has been developed together with the development of the human brain. It has developed on planet Earth. So, by evolution it developed in the way that allows us to survive here. It does not have to have anything to do with "how it really is". Our brains are designed to see this logic as the only one that is "logical", that "makes sense". But of course this feels like this to us, because this is how our brains are. Maybe it is logical to have free will and at the same time be doomed to be saved or not, maybe aliens if existed would not be material or visible to us, maybe the time is also a variable which can be manipulated, maybe everything we ever thought of the world and universe is just a very limited and subjective interpretation of it.

What you see in TV

I was on the beach listening to young people speaking American English. And I had this thought, that in the end 99% of the movies I saw in my life were American movies. TV series, comedies, romantic comedies, what is played in TV, they are mostly American movies. They show the way that people there live, they show their culture, their way of speaking, their way of behaving..

..but for people from eastern Europe for example, those movies show nothing that is typical to them. Yet it is same in all the movies. I think that as being Polish, I have developed this model of a "movie" in my head, where movie means something artificial, where people behave in a certain (often weird) way, which has nothing to do with the reality.. and it has always felt to me that for some weird reason all the movies as shot in the same style, in the same convention.

But that is not true! They are shot in the same style not because of the "weird reason", but for the reason that this mimics the way of living of the people who made them! Such a discovery..

What follows this, it is so interesting to realise that a person coming from US may not have this "model of a movie" developed in their head at all. Therefore the notion of "a movie" may be totally different for different people, depending on where they come from. And people from one group probably never imagine that the other group can even exist.

The global impact of the past

What if my past determines the way I am, shapes the world that I see. And what if this "past" consists not only of the story of my life, but also the stories of the ones of my ancestors. All the conflicting thoughts that run through my head, the little hints of how it could easily feel different than it feels right now. Where do I know it from? Why do I have so much grief in me?

I'm not claiming that I'm connected magically with the people that lived here before me. But those people interacted with people who were my grandgrandparents, my grandgrandparents raised my grandparents, and my grandparents raised my parents, who in turn raised me. The world is wider than the frame of our words. What if memories and attitudes can also be passed, just like genes are? What if there's tremendously much more to it than people suspect nowadays?

For example, the war, it happened not that much time ago. My grandparents had traumatic experiences there. It's even hard for me to imagine what it could feel like, how hopeless nights they've been through. Yet still I am able to feel what may be an impact of this. The way I react inside to people passing me on the street, the way it feels when someone accuses me of something I'm not guilty of, the way I can't tolerate injustice, is it really coming only from social adaptation of human kind, or my cultural background? There are things deep in the back of my head which I can't explain by referring to the culture, my own history, also I cannot say that it's common things for everyone. But when my mom told me about the history of my grandparents, the ones I vaguely remember from when I was a child, then these things start making sense.

If I am right, then it's extremely important to know where you come from. To know the "context" of yourself. The modern culture of  separation of the individual is then bringing only bad. It's pushing us backwards on the evolution path..

or.. maybe it's just pushing us to a D-tour? With all the technological advancement we lost one factor of evolution which is geographical location. Maybe we are just adapting to the changed conditions. One thing is sure, they're not easy the times we live in.

Everything comes at its price

People's behaviors and thoughts are so much determined by the environment in which they are living, by the country they have been born in and in which they live, by the opinions of their friends and people staying in the close surroundings to them. By what they see in television and in the Internet. In the end a happy life does not differ much from a life of an animal - call it a hamster. Following the impulses, following the stereotypes, the schematic behaviors, people repeating what they have heard from other people, getting used to one place, doing what the others around are doing, not spending time on stressing out, on trying to change something, on thinking too much. Following the scenario.

I decided I do not want to live a hamster life. Even though everything comes at its price.