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.

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.

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.