Read this about mindfulness the other day and thought it was interesting. The study isn’t orientated the way the headline would have you believe, it looks at how mindfulness affects people based on their degree of independent or interdependent self-conception, and then also how you can alter that conception and how that affects mindfulness.
Another mindblowing story. Just insane.
Fear not. Our very own SkylineDiver has assured us it’s a perfectly acceptable carbon-based fuel.
Interesting piece. I don’t think it’s that surprising. Meditation is essentially a tool for taking apart and remaking the mind. It has much in common in that respect with psychedelics, which are also valuable and powerful tools but also leave some people traumatized. There’s a bit of a survivorship bias problem with meditation teachers, in that people who teach it are typically people who have found it extremely beneficial, but that doesn’t mean it will lead inexorably to the same destination for everyone.
I think the vast majority of people, who are not on a full-on quest for enlightenment, will benefit from meditation practice and it sounds like the author agrees. I think he conflates a couple different things in the piece. He spends most of it talking about long-term, very intense meditation causing adverse restructuring of the brain, which, fine, I can buy that maybe this happens in some cases. But the anecdote about the woman who went to retreat and had an acute psychotic episode and killed herself seems basically unrelated and doesn’t really impress me. People without a history of psychosis have psychotic episodes. She was 25. Maybe it was the onset of schizophrenia, who knows. All sorts of things can induce an initial episode. Religious practices certainly can, but that doesn’t mean there should be a warning label on attending an Episcopal Church.
I have a week-long retreat coming up in late September. I’ll let you know if I go insane.
I had to fix a problem like this for my girlfriend and I don’t remember the exact details but it had to do with the fact that contacts are stored in multiple accounts. Typically it’s your iCloud account and Google account, which is likely why the missing contacts don’t have iPhones - they’re the Google contacts. It might be as simple as going to Settings > Accounts & Passwords and turning on Contacts for the Google account. Also go to the Contacts app and ensure it’s set to use contacts from both. If you want to rationalise the list - delete duplicates and so on - you have to go to the iCloud website and do it.
Yeah I was thinking it sounded a lot like psychedelics. Some people can handle them, some can’t. I was surprised to find out meditation could make that concrete of an impact and even make changes that show up on an MRI (when not meditating). At least according to the HackerNews comments on this article.
Are you going to the no-talkie version?
Can you describe the benefits you’ve gotten so far from meditation, and what you hope to gain from this retreat?
This is going to sound crazy but you might try calling Apple. I had a problem with iMessage on my work mac. I tried everything off google and finally in desperation just called Apple. The woman was super-knowledgeable and spent over an hour on the phone with me fixing it. I couldn’t believe it. I figured at the time they must really be pushing iMessage hard or something.
In news that should suprise no one the FBI had informants and agents involved in the plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, with informants and agents organizing and instigating
Given the occasional accusation here of the Feds targeting Blacks and Lefties instead of Trumpers, it will surprise a few people.
There were lots of groups to choose from. Michigan, as the state’s attorney general told Congress in May, is “the original home of the militia movement,” and the Southern Poverty Law Center currently identifies no fewer than 22 “extreme antigovernment groups” active in the state. Timothy McVeigh trained with a group called the Michigan Militia Corps prior to carrying out the Oklahoma City bombing. And Justen Watkins, the US leader of the Base, an international neo-Nazi group, is a Michigan native and was arrested there last October.
But many of those groups say they have no interest in violence. They insist they offer only the opportunity to join a “well regulated Militia,” civic-minded organizations they believe are not only permitted but strongly encouraged by the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
As Dan began scrolling through gun rights pages, he was prompted by Facebook’s algorithm to check out a private group called the Wolverine Watchmen, which described itself as “a group of Patriots” looking to “recruit like minded individuals.” After an initial round of screening, the group promised him the opportunity to train with them.
Awesome
Long-time meditators have a host of measurable changes to the brain, off the top of my head including smaller amygdalas, different gray matter distribution and altered rest EEGs.
The retreat has group classes at which attendees participate in discussions, but outside of that talking is discouraged. Meals are held silently, for example.
The benefits amount to greater control over my mind and more equanimity towards my circumstances, which sounds boring, but one of the points of studying meditation is that you realise that that’s everything. Like those studies where people win the lottery or become paraplegics and it produces no long-term change in their subjective wellbeing. Controlling one’s life circumstances is as nothing compared to controlling the way one reacts to them.
The problem is that the mammalian brain developed this system of emotions and drives to steer the body towards things that were good for it and away from things that were bad, and when the thinking mind came along it hijacked this system and coupled it to ideas going on in our heads, which may or may not bear any relation to reality. Modern society has made this predicament worse. Consciously paying more attention to how your body feels, what it needs and what it wants to avoid is a good way to diminish the ability of thoughts and ideas to generate destructive emotions.
I guess a good way to put it is - you know what happens to people’s brains when they watch Fox News all day and it’s all like “OH NO A MIGRANT CARAVAN! MS-13! ANTIFA! THREATS!”? I’m trying to move my brain in the opposite direction of that. It might not really occur to you, but what happens to people when they watch Fox all day also involves physical, neuroplastic change to the brain. That’s how changing the way minds function happens.
Privileged, self-absorbed Westerners whitewashing and repackaging Buddhist meditation into a for-profit industry of Crossfit For Your Mind™ only to collapse under the weight of it all into inescapable oceanic neuroticism is today’s moment of zen.
Ironically (given the piece suzzer linked) my advice for avoiding commodified “Crossfit For Your Mind” stuff would be to avoid anything with the word “mindfulness” in it. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with mindfulness meditation per se, it’s that mindfulness is overstudied in scientific literature as it’s the easiest to reduce to a simple set of instructions. As a result it’s the most prone to be pulled out of context and prescribed as a panacea with Scientific Evidence behind it. My teacher once talked about someone he heard of going to Christmas Island, where asylum seekers are held in Australia, and trying to do mindfulness with the detainees. It turns out that “pay close attention to the contents of your mind, really look at what you’re thinking about” is very bad advice to give to traumatised people.
From the preface to The Mindful Way Through Depression (mindfulness based cognitive therapy)
It may be wise to not undertake the entire program while in the midst of an episode of clinical depression. Current evidence suggests that it may be prudent to wait until you have gotten the necessary help in climbing out of the depths and are able to approach this new way of working with your thoughts and feelings with your mind and spirit unburdened by the crushing weight of acute depression
I remember in the original charging documents there were new informants turning up giving evidence as the plot actually unfolded, who up till that point hadn’t been mentioned but were clearly part of the group to be able to see what they saw. I wondered then if the reason their evidence wasn’t used for the planning stages is because they were the planners themselves.
Iron’s point is also noted, makes a nice change!
My personal pet peeve with the “meditation movement” isn’t that meditation itself is bad, its that corporations are pushing meditation on employees as a (conveniently cheap for the employer!) way to “fix” all the mental health damage that employers are inflicting on workers in the first place. Hey guys, maybe we should stop putting certifiable sociopaths in charge of increasingly toxic workplaces before we give employees another assignment to do in their already vanishingly small personal time off the clock.
As Chris already pointed out the article is classic “hey guys I found a couple outliers so the whole thing is super scarrrrrrrry,”
It’s clickbait nonsense.
In which Star Trek series do we get to hear the N-word?
- The Original Series
- The Next Generation
- Deep Space Nine
- Voyager
- Enterprise
- Discovery
0 voters
Huge Trek fan, but I have no idea. TOS always talked about race through metaphor and TNG was too optimistic for hardcore racism. Wouldn’t that have been censored on network TV? Guessing DS9 because that was always the grittiest of the Star Treks.