I've been meditating about twice daily (15-30 minutes) for about two years, and more sporadically for a year before that. I started because I was feeling really confused and anxious and desperate about stuff in general, and needed some kind of anchor or Regular Good Thing in my life. I could go on and on about the various benefits and so on, but I've rarely found that type of thing very interesting to read about myself, so...
Here's a thought. There's a bias in the current "secular" discourse about meditation, probably inherited from the psychiatric perspective of the "mindfulness" movement. Let's call it the emotional bias. The whole discussion seems to revolve around "emotional benefits." This might seem like a natural given, but let's question it.
Just to shake things up a bit, let's compare meditation to some other activity. Say, reading. It would be weird to talk about reading only in terms of "emotional benefits." Like, "I read twice a day and I have found that it gives me a noticable increase in feelings of joy and wellbeing." You would say, "okay, but what are you reading? Is it interesting? What have you learned?" Of course meditation and reading are not the same thing, but I just want to point out that it's not immediately obvious that everything people do intentionally is for "emotional benefits."
For me, while I do appreciate emotional benefits, the fascination of meditation for me is more cognitive. It's almost like a puzzle. I can't really explain it. It's not clear what the puzzle is about, but if I had to say something, I'd say it has a lot to do with the relationship between myself and "phenomena." Maybe between my mind as such and its specific manifestations -- I'm aware this might sound pretty crazy. It has to do with figuring out (or penetrating or unravelling or getting to the bottom of) some kind of fundamental confusion.
So, I'm not very impressed by the dogmatic version of secular meditation. I caricaturize this dogma as saying "meditation is purely a technique for improving your emotional life and your career performance, anything else is religious woo-woo bullshit nonsense." It's such a cocky attitude. "Alright religious people, you've been messing around with this stuff for thousands of years, now we'll take over, throw out the weird stuff and do it properly."
Here's a thought. There's a bias in the current "secular" discourse about meditation, probably inherited from the psychiatric perspective of the "mindfulness" movement. Let's call it the emotional bias. The whole discussion seems to revolve around "emotional benefits." This might seem like a natural given, but let's question it.
Just to shake things up a bit, let's compare meditation to some other activity. Say, reading. It would be weird to talk about reading only in terms of "emotional benefits." Like, "I read twice a day and I have found that it gives me a noticable increase in feelings of joy and wellbeing." You would say, "okay, but what are you reading? Is it interesting? What have you learned?" Of course meditation and reading are not the same thing, but I just want to point out that it's not immediately obvious that everything people do intentionally is for "emotional benefits."
For me, while I do appreciate emotional benefits, the fascination of meditation for me is more cognitive. It's almost like a puzzle. I can't really explain it. It's not clear what the puzzle is about, but if I had to say something, I'd say it has a lot to do with the relationship between myself and "phenomena." Maybe between my mind as such and its specific manifestations -- I'm aware this might sound pretty crazy. It has to do with figuring out (or penetrating or unravelling or getting to the bottom of) some kind of fundamental confusion.
So, I'm not very impressed by the dogmatic version of secular meditation. I caricaturize this dogma as saying "meditation is purely a technique for improving your emotional life and your career performance, anything else is religious woo-woo bullshit nonsense." It's such a cocky attitude. "Alright religious people, you've been messing around with this stuff for thousands of years, now we'll take over, throw out the weird stuff and do it properly."