Autobiographical: Buddhist Meditation, Superstition & Philosophy.
27 September 2017 [link youtube]
Asking "How real is meditation?" is, in many ways, just as absurd as asking, "How real is a dream?"
Youtube Automatic Transcription
so we did just discuss this off-camera
and while we were having the conversation that repeatedly said wow we should have recorded this as a video this is a little bit less spontaneous than my usual videos because now we're coming on camera and sort of talking about it again but this is the sort of topic where I know for a fact this will be really useful and really meaningful to a small number of people in a profound way I mean sometimes I do a video and it's about a topic that's of interest to thousands of people you know I've had videos that reach not as an audience of thousands but maybe it's interesting or important to them in a shallow way definitely what I'm talking about here even if it only matters to 15 people it's gonna matter profoundly a lot for years to come for those those 15 people so it's worth talking about for that reason I'll also say I mean this is this is one of my reasons for being on YouTube in the first place I have a four year old daughter I was really concerned that my daughter would grow up to have a romanticized view of Buddhism because she knew her father was a scholar of what ISM you know I mean that can leave a kind of impression on the kid where they're just Pro Buddhists or on critical of Buddhism where they assumed that I would be uncritically Pro meditation or you know favor certain kinds of supernatural religious practices would I be connected but it's a more Buddhist ethics or something and so I really wanted to leave enough YouTube videos to show look kid you know if you're seeing this ten years from now your father did know a lot about Buddhism but your father was a man you already had a sophisticated philosophy before we ever got involved with one of them it's not like without Buddhism I'd have no philosophy or anything in my life you know what it wasn't I mean some people are like that I mean you know so if that's you know repure said if that's your experience be honest about it some people had no philosophy in their lives for they got both Buddhism for me I already was at a very advanced level in European philosophy ancient as well as 19th century as well as modern and you know I'd already kind of it wasn't like there was some void in my life I was trying to fill you know what I mean when it when I got involved put ISM I already approached in this self-confident in analytical way and then I'm someone who did I found a lot of value in Buddhist philosophy its tradition but I was never on critical of supernatural claims or cognitive of claim that's really what this year because this sometimes it's not magic they're claiming with meditation but it's some kind of cognitive benefit some kind of health benefit some kind of kind of self-improvement all right so what what was the question you you put to me yeah when you first got into Buddhism did you meditate did you try to meditate or did you have this opinion of it right prior to right so I mean this answer gets into the different phases of my life in which I was involved in Buddhism and how I approach these issues now I express myself on these issues it is definitely true that in my earliest days with Buddhism I assumed that the Nirvana experience was an experience that people had historically you know over 2,000 years ago and 500 years ago and still today now I used the word experience advisedly if you ask me is a dream real well it's a very strange question a dream is a real dream you know it exists in as much as it's a dream but there's no way you can convince me that a dream is something more than just a dream even if I have a dream predicting the future and then by happenstance that event transpires you still can't convince me that this dream has some kind of supernatural power to predict the future sometimes people have a dream about a car accident and then they have a car accident well people have car accidents all the time you know some people are gonna attach other meanings onto this and of course how many times did you have a dream about something that didn't happen you know this is the problem with the way people assigned meaning sometimes religious and philosophical meanings and I'm so called transcendental meaning to hallucinations dreams just thoughts and altered states of mind okay so it is definitely true in the in the early days my vote with Buddhism I wasn't just open to the possibility this was an experience even if you call it a hallucinatory experience or a dreamlike experience that people had again and again over a period of many centuries and that inspired people to take on a new direction of the flies right so that's not conceding a lot you know what I mean like that's like saying hey look there's a type of vision these people have had and we can inquire into that and we could talk to you about it what have you and now I'd say in the latter half of my engagement with Buddhism after I really became an expert so I was in the beginning we know we're all born ignorant you know the turning point was that no I did not even accept that I did not even make that accept concession I do not even think there is such an experience or such a hallucination or such a dream so that's the turning point for me and in terms of people who talk to me face-to-face from someone else's perspective that's quite a subtle shift you know so in the early early days one of the one of the first I think the first face-to-face debate I ever had with someone about meditation how real is meditation and that I'm phrasing it that way intentionally it really is just as absurd as asking how real is a dream you know you can experience altered states of mind you can experience lissajous dreams the question of real or unreal is in many ways the wrong question to be asking right but I had a face-to-face debate with the guy who was a devout Buddhist lay person had been furred was ethnically Sinhalese he was from Sri Lanka he wasn't a white person so he had grown up in Buddhism and he became totally fluent in English and he read advanced material scholarship on what is in emotion song she was a really advanced layperson and he really excitedly was presenting me with this evidence from a scientific experiment in which people attempted to lower the crime rate in Washington DC by having mass meditation having a group of people meditate and then measuring the change in their crime statistics and I require I've responded very skeptically by but you know with respect respectfully but skeptically but walking him through step by step kind of what was wrong even how the research question was posed and the study you know what I mean and what did this mean for Buddhist meditation anyway the Buddha didn't promise you'd lower the crime rate through meditation what are you really claiming here and then above all else what really had an impact on him was I said why are you comparing this to doing nothing why are you acting as if your options are meditation or doing nothing why don't you compare the efficacy of this meditation to actually going out and addressing the underlying causes of crime such as poverty homelessness drug addiction whatever the local problems may be unemployment you know I mean the reason that there's crime is due to people being stressed out it's look that's a quick it's completely surreal it's you know it relies it relies on comic book logic so I just say well use comic logic I'm gonna flesh that a little bit I remember I had a English teacher when I was in high school who said you know if you just think logically it makes sense that we see the way Superman sees when you draw a comic book it looks like there our beams coming out of his eyes you know what his x-ray vision and his laser vision right when you actually think about it it's not that Superman would shoot x-rays out of his eyes it's that there were x-rays going in if it's logically the exact opposite it's in a comic book likewise it's very easy to just draw lines coming out of someone's brain and you know I've I mean circles going to illustrate the concept of psychic waves telepathy psychic waves in a comic book it's very easy to pick that it's very easy for a child understand it's very easy for us to relate to as something real right the I think the underlying assumption is you have a bunch of people meditating and they make magical waves and then that you know it really is at that at that level and I think that's why you can you can rationally challenge people's irrational belief same with what I just said about dreams and predicting the future what interview yeah so I mean meditation and the scientistic claims of a meditation I never accepted claims about so-called mindfulness so-called he passing a method and again you have to remember I wasn't like a secular outsider I wasn't like a Christian criticizing these meditation practices I was an Orthodox tera vaada Buddhist criticizing this practices so you know the Maha societal method of meditation cannot be vindicated scripturally or doctrinally it also cannot be vindicated scientifically the veep Asuna method which again began with a certain enterprising businessman in Myanmar has its own story but it's one modern person created this method meditation cannot be vindicated cannot be validated scripturally or doctrinally it also cannot be validated scientifically right it has both problems and again I use this image in the earlier video modern Buddhism can be as different from ancient Buddhism as Santa Claus is different from Jesus Christ you know yeah we can describe these things as meditation but this is not canonical medication this isn't what this isn't what the Buddha taught you know what I mean this isn't what Buddhism was founded on so that put me in a very unique and powerful position as a critic of meditation within Buddhism and I did have the experience of seeing people for him crying when I talked about meditation I was talking about no respectful way but what I was saying was devastating to their whole worldview so this comes to one image that I already met you in our first conversation but I mean it so again if you ask me do you believe in meditation which is a it's a totally rational way to phrase the question but just like the question do you believe in dreams it's almost impossible to answer if you know what I mean right um one of the images I used again I've seen people break down weeping over this I've said to people in response to these issues of meditation raised you know it's quite possible for me to flex the muscles in my arm it could be your arm could be your leg but just to as hard as you can you know tighten up those muscles and hold it you know flex it until it reaches the point of exhaustion and then when it is relaxed you're gonna get a kind of tingling you're gonna get a peculiar sensation right and I said simply you can do the same thing with your mind your mind is not a muscle but you can in a sense flex your attention span you can you know follow there are multiple different models they're different states of mind and you strain to hold it to hold it still you know it's natural for your mind to be moving around and be you know one if from moment to moment tense and relaxed focus on this or focus on that operating in this mode operating in that mode but just like the attention required of holding your your arm in a certain state you can remain in a hyper alert state focused one way or another one type of image held in your mind what have you there I'm not gonna give examples here but there are many different modes of meditation that have been associated with Buddhism again some orthodox some completely unorthodox and let me tell you something you're gonna feel tingling you're gonna feel a kind of a heightened state or hyper exhausted state or both you're gonna feel unusual sensations you're gonna feel an altered state of mind in a sense the tingling in your arm is an altered state of your arm what I mean you're it's it's a peculiar mode of feeling and mode of being even you know but it's meaningless and in the same way that I wouldn't ascribe these cultural values supernatural values in religious expectations to the tingling in my arm I wouldn't ascribe this you know in my mind either you've got to remain detached again detachment is a Buddhist you know a virtue and if that people really break down even when the conversation just got to that point you know where it's like look that because they agreed they didn't want to agree but they knew they knew what I was saying was true and these are people who love snores meditating so you know now I have also I've meditated at some of the most August and respected people for the spot of theories around the world and with of some famous Buddhist monks and so on you know I mean so I may be another reason where that image is compelling when I was saying it to other people who have that external that what I'm talking you know that it's not so different from tingling in your weight but in a sense it Israel I mean this is that this is the thing the tingling in your arm is real it's just meaningless it's not what you want it to be it's not anything more than what it is at the surface of reality to their dreams like you know III dreamed this so like you know right it's so important if you can't just be I've seen people respond that way if they have a dream about speaking to a deceased relative so they dream about speaking with their deceased mother or something and then they said what can't just be Turing was so meaningful what if it's just a dream and you like it you want it to be something which what if it's a dream plus wishful thinking cocaine - I'm sorry alcohol cocaine all of them all of them we tell the states of mind that be sure their people have gotten drunk and whole bunch of other things happen the night of change I sure no doubt yeah it doesn't mean that God lives in a bottle of whiskey it doesn't mean that God is at the bottom of a you know tab of LSD or something it doesn't mean that God is that God or some other religious meaning is hiding within these things yeah that's right anyway there are actually several steps further I can take that discussion that starts with the image of tingling and straining your arms during your brain but me I don't I don't think we have to in this video but um you know I just mentioned that kind of conversation with people who were really attached to meditation has often been devastating for them even though you can tell what I'm saying is not really dismissing meditation it's hourly but you don't even have to take it that way it's like well there were physical exercises and there are mental exercises that analysis of mine leaves some scope for this to be you know something other than you know something other than a scam but very often in our world in the 21st century meditation yes a scam precisely because it's being packaged and sold as something it's not and there's there is and it's an overused term cognitive dissonance is overused but a lot of Buddhists struggle with cognitive dissonance because whatever meditation practice they're doing they know is not squared with the ancient authentic form of meditation recorded in the texts and then what they're looking for in terms of outcomes the religious experience they want to have is maybe fundamentally on Buddhists you know what I mean what what you know some people want to have telepathic superpowers I've read I've read autobiographies where people admitted that that they got involved with meditation because they wanted to have supernatural powers and many traditions of Buddhism will promise you that you know Tibetan Buddhism and what-have-you some you know they or they thought it would make them smarter you know it's very human but very pathetic they thought well if I workout at the gym I get stronger if I workout in meditation I'll get smarter or gain these cognitive abilities they may believe that in a pseudoscience sense or they may believe it in a more supernatural and religious sense and but the Buddha didn't promise you any of this this is not this is not the the meditation he taught this is not the purpose of meditation as he taught it so a lot of people are walking around with with a kind of a kind of broken heart about their own religion and their own faith and they can't be honest with themselves about how the different pieces don't fit together that in a sense what they're believing in is a religion of their own invention and not a religion that the Buddha taught you know yeah my impression of meditation is one of the goals at least you know you mentioned these goals with higher intelligence or telepathic powers one is just mindfulness or feeling less attached to a situation so or just being able to see the broader picture so I think you are in an interesting position to give you know to discuss these matters with people that are really into Buddhism and meditation because you you didn't come to these late you know I know you're really well and I know that you have a lot of these like qualities that people are you're very intelligent you you know you're able to be very objective and rational about things and that you didn't come to that through meditation right I don't know that was partly why I was just like interested in asking this because like I don't know it to me it's just really impressive how you're able to stay so right grounded well I just think people don't see that about me on youtube to some extent cuz on youtube I do kind of clown around it's true and if anything I wallow in some of my emotions here and as a middle-aged person I have the luxury of wallowing and emotions on my character I don't I don't shut it out or what-have-you but it's true I'm a very detached person and has someone has come up in violent in stressful situations in real life it's it's true and it's true that's not a product of meditation so if as soon as we state what the desiderata of meditation are so meditation someone's undertaking meditation in order to achieve these qualities you mentioned but it could be any list of qualities or any any list of objectives we can then look at the mechanics of what the meditation is and what it's supposed to be so to give a definite historical example meditation as described by good at home pardon me Buddha Gosa Buddha cosa is the commentator on the Pali Canon he wrote what are called the commentaries so Buddha ghosa is not the same person as the put up there are two different historical figures but he has meditation practices where you sit in a room with a human skeleton and look at the skeleton he has meditation practices where you sit outdoors in the sunlight with a dish of water and then you remove the water and you just visualize the absent water we sit with a dish of Earth in sunlight and stare at the earth and then move the he outlines these these meditation practices why why would that help you if you go through those prayers just honestly ask so we can test it scientifically why would that help you deal with the circumstance such as a police officer being insulting and demeaning towards you and you said that's a really good example because a lot of people even if you think it's not gonna bother you to have a police officer in a position of authority and sole human demean you and treat you of it a lot of people they weren't expecting it but it really gets to them and they really get furious or you know you know and there's a lot there look in some ways it's relating to the schoolyard bully and someone's relating to your school teacher because this is someone authority and maybe you were expecting or demanding to be you know maybe implicitly a certain level will respect you feel this according to you a situation like that those are the real-world situations where detachment matters right how could that possibly be related to sitting and staring at a skeleton staring at addition water and so on now Buddha doses meditation is not the same as the Buddha's what the Buddha says limited the jhanas in the actual poly canon as i said in a recent video that's really you know transcendental in the sense of there's a whole East Natori component to it of actually seeing your past incarnations and of having these kind of almost indescribable visions of the sphere of formless things and what have you you know tell me what does the sphere of for most things look like you know what is the what is the sphere of neither form nor non form look like you know there's this sequence of spheres even the translation sphere by the way is very peculiar if you're looking at the original tally but anyway your mind is elevated up above the heavens and above the gods and indeed you're supposed to be able to go up and talk to the gods you're suppose to be able to teleport yourself up to the heavens and have conversations with Brahma and Indra and that's Pali canons full of that it's full of these kinds of supernatural dialogues you can put us monks and deities supernatural deities as well as magical beings here on earth like yetis and demons but anyway so that is a very rich mythological tradition how would it be connected to you know the real world situation of this police officer is being denigrating to me and you feel so angry or you lose control if you you know you lose your detachment or any other example that why you know why would one helping the other even if we uncritically believe in what the religious text is is telling us about about meditation yeah so yeah maybe to come back to my earlier point wrap it up this video it's already past 20 minutes but you know I said earlier briefly that if I were to contrast sort of the first half of my period as a poly scholar to the second half one of the differences was earlier on I was open to the fact I thought I was going to get out in the field do fieldwork do like anthropological research I was gonna meet Buddhist monks who had the Nirvana experience who had the experience of meditating and experiencing the jhanas in the different levels and who had maybe you know whether he think of as a hallucination or a dream or whatever who had seen their prior incarnations and you know and that this was a dream that although my perspective only a dream a dream that was a great historical significance because people had it again and again they had a 2000 years ago they had it 500 years ago and this was still happening this was a part of the human experience that people could still have today and again that that's only assuming this experience exists in the same sense that LSD exists or that dreams exist you know there's a scientific sense in which dreams exist and there's a sight there's a sense of which dreams are nevertheless unreal and we could say the same but these other things and for sure there was a subtle but profound change when I realized that no this experience is not even something that exists this is a myth a myth in the truest sense of the meaning of the word mythology and that sadly for 2,500 years all kinds of different people whether they hallucinate it or not whether they meditate or not in different ways they were groping around to reproduce this mythological experience and they couldn't even have it that there are no Buddhist monks today who even have the Nirvana experience as it's written out the ancient texts and that I think is the reason why in every generation there is so much innovation there are always new forms of meditation coming out because people in these positions of religious authority want to compensate for what they're lacking they're not having the Nirvana experience themselves they're not able to deliver that to their parishioners so instead they come up with something like the mahasaya dog you know experience my society I was a meditation leader and he came up with this totally original notion like having meditators sit and drink really slowly analyze what the drink tastes like also eating food in slow motion and walking in slow motion and you know supposedly you're supposed to realize that although the drink seems to be delicious so the food seems to be delicious when you slow it down and analyze it into its components you realize this is an illusion and it actually neither tastes good nor bad this is supposed to be an incident reality okay that's a totally new philosophy totally new meditative practice that has nothing to do with what the Buddha taught and is in a very real sense unbuttoned but that was an experience he could have and he could teach and he could share with others and that's what everyone's groping around for in this religion it's exactly because the nerve an experience is not available is not real it's not something that people are experiencing that they're desperately looking for something to substitute for it to supplant it with and that's why meditation means different things to different people in different cultures and why even now you know that there's this constant source of innovation for the profound experience nobody is having I said Nirvana is a myth that is much more meaningful than Noah's Ark it's much more meaningful than Moses going up to the top of the mountain and taking up the tablets it's a myth you know that promises you that the riddle to the meaning of life and indeed to the cosmology of the universe gods and men angels and demons the living and the dead this great cycle of reincarnation that the riddle to all this can be understood by you if only you can comprehend the the nature of desire itself and tear up desire by its roots and then you're gonna have this world shattering insight this transcendental experience and that's not true and it's never been true
and while we were having the conversation that repeatedly said wow we should have recorded this as a video this is a little bit less spontaneous than my usual videos because now we're coming on camera and sort of talking about it again but this is the sort of topic where I know for a fact this will be really useful and really meaningful to a small number of people in a profound way I mean sometimes I do a video and it's about a topic that's of interest to thousands of people you know I've had videos that reach not as an audience of thousands but maybe it's interesting or important to them in a shallow way definitely what I'm talking about here even if it only matters to 15 people it's gonna matter profoundly a lot for years to come for those those 15 people so it's worth talking about for that reason I'll also say I mean this is this is one of my reasons for being on YouTube in the first place I have a four year old daughter I was really concerned that my daughter would grow up to have a romanticized view of Buddhism because she knew her father was a scholar of what ISM you know I mean that can leave a kind of impression on the kid where they're just Pro Buddhists or on critical of Buddhism where they assumed that I would be uncritically Pro meditation or you know favor certain kinds of supernatural religious practices would I be connected but it's a more Buddhist ethics or something and so I really wanted to leave enough YouTube videos to show look kid you know if you're seeing this ten years from now your father did know a lot about Buddhism but your father was a man you already had a sophisticated philosophy before we ever got involved with one of them it's not like without Buddhism I'd have no philosophy or anything in my life you know what it wasn't I mean some people are like that I mean you know so if that's you know repure said if that's your experience be honest about it some people had no philosophy in their lives for they got both Buddhism for me I already was at a very advanced level in European philosophy ancient as well as 19th century as well as modern and you know I'd already kind of it wasn't like there was some void in my life I was trying to fill you know what I mean when it when I got involved put ISM I already approached in this self-confident in analytical way and then I'm someone who did I found a lot of value in Buddhist philosophy its tradition but I was never on critical of supernatural claims or cognitive of claim that's really what this year because this sometimes it's not magic they're claiming with meditation but it's some kind of cognitive benefit some kind of health benefit some kind of kind of self-improvement all right so what what was the question you you put to me yeah when you first got into Buddhism did you meditate did you try to meditate or did you have this opinion of it right prior to right so I mean this answer gets into the different phases of my life in which I was involved in Buddhism and how I approach these issues now I express myself on these issues it is definitely true that in my earliest days with Buddhism I assumed that the Nirvana experience was an experience that people had historically you know over 2,000 years ago and 500 years ago and still today now I used the word experience advisedly if you ask me is a dream real well it's a very strange question a dream is a real dream you know it exists in as much as it's a dream but there's no way you can convince me that a dream is something more than just a dream even if I have a dream predicting the future and then by happenstance that event transpires you still can't convince me that this dream has some kind of supernatural power to predict the future sometimes people have a dream about a car accident and then they have a car accident well people have car accidents all the time you know some people are gonna attach other meanings onto this and of course how many times did you have a dream about something that didn't happen you know this is the problem with the way people assigned meaning sometimes religious and philosophical meanings and I'm so called transcendental meaning to hallucinations dreams just thoughts and altered states of mind okay so it is definitely true in the in the early days my vote with Buddhism I wasn't just open to the possibility this was an experience even if you call it a hallucinatory experience or a dreamlike experience that people had again and again over a period of many centuries and that inspired people to take on a new direction of the flies right so that's not conceding a lot you know what I mean like that's like saying hey look there's a type of vision these people have had and we can inquire into that and we could talk to you about it what have you and now I'd say in the latter half of my engagement with Buddhism after I really became an expert so I was in the beginning we know we're all born ignorant you know the turning point was that no I did not even accept that I did not even make that accept concession I do not even think there is such an experience or such a hallucination or such a dream so that's the turning point for me and in terms of people who talk to me face-to-face from someone else's perspective that's quite a subtle shift you know so in the early early days one of the one of the first I think the first face-to-face debate I ever had with someone about meditation how real is meditation and that I'm phrasing it that way intentionally it really is just as absurd as asking how real is a dream you know you can experience altered states of mind you can experience lissajous dreams the question of real or unreal is in many ways the wrong question to be asking right but I had a face-to-face debate with the guy who was a devout Buddhist lay person had been furred was ethnically Sinhalese he was from Sri Lanka he wasn't a white person so he had grown up in Buddhism and he became totally fluent in English and he read advanced material scholarship on what is in emotion song she was a really advanced layperson and he really excitedly was presenting me with this evidence from a scientific experiment in which people attempted to lower the crime rate in Washington DC by having mass meditation having a group of people meditate and then measuring the change in their crime statistics and I require I've responded very skeptically by but you know with respect respectfully but skeptically but walking him through step by step kind of what was wrong even how the research question was posed and the study you know what I mean and what did this mean for Buddhist meditation anyway the Buddha didn't promise you'd lower the crime rate through meditation what are you really claiming here and then above all else what really had an impact on him was I said why are you comparing this to doing nothing why are you acting as if your options are meditation or doing nothing why don't you compare the efficacy of this meditation to actually going out and addressing the underlying causes of crime such as poverty homelessness drug addiction whatever the local problems may be unemployment you know I mean the reason that there's crime is due to people being stressed out it's look that's a quick it's completely surreal it's you know it relies it relies on comic book logic so I just say well use comic logic I'm gonna flesh that a little bit I remember I had a English teacher when I was in high school who said you know if you just think logically it makes sense that we see the way Superman sees when you draw a comic book it looks like there our beams coming out of his eyes you know what his x-ray vision and his laser vision right when you actually think about it it's not that Superman would shoot x-rays out of his eyes it's that there were x-rays going in if it's logically the exact opposite it's in a comic book likewise it's very easy to just draw lines coming out of someone's brain and you know I've I mean circles going to illustrate the concept of psychic waves telepathy psychic waves in a comic book it's very easy to pick that it's very easy for a child understand it's very easy for us to relate to as something real right the I think the underlying assumption is you have a bunch of people meditating and they make magical waves and then that you know it really is at that at that level and I think that's why you can you can rationally challenge people's irrational belief same with what I just said about dreams and predicting the future what interview yeah so I mean meditation and the scientistic claims of a meditation I never accepted claims about so-called mindfulness so-called he passing a method and again you have to remember I wasn't like a secular outsider I wasn't like a Christian criticizing these meditation practices I was an Orthodox tera vaada Buddhist criticizing this practices so you know the Maha societal method of meditation cannot be vindicated scripturally or doctrinally it also cannot be vindicated scientifically the veep Asuna method which again began with a certain enterprising businessman in Myanmar has its own story but it's one modern person created this method meditation cannot be vindicated cannot be validated scripturally or doctrinally it also cannot be validated scientifically right it has both problems and again I use this image in the earlier video modern Buddhism can be as different from ancient Buddhism as Santa Claus is different from Jesus Christ you know yeah we can describe these things as meditation but this is not canonical medication this isn't what this isn't what the Buddha taught you know what I mean this isn't what Buddhism was founded on so that put me in a very unique and powerful position as a critic of meditation within Buddhism and I did have the experience of seeing people for him crying when I talked about meditation I was talking about no respectful way but what I was saying was devastating to their whole worldview so this comes to one image that I already met you in our first conversation but I mean it so again if you ask me do you believe in meditation which is a it's a totally rational way to phrase the question but just like the question do you believe in dreams it's almost impossible to answer if you know what I mean right um one of the images I used again I've seen people break down weeping over this I've said to people in response to these issues of meditation raised you know it's quite possible for me to flex the muscles in my arm it could be your arm could be your leg but just to as hard as you can you know tighten up those muscles and hold it you know flex it until it reaches the point of exhaustion and then when it is relaxed you're gonna get a kind of tingling you're gonna get a peculiar sensation right and I said simply you can do the same thing with your mind your mind is not a muscle but you can in a sense flex your attention span you can you know follow there are multiple different models they're different states of mind and you strain to hold it to hold it still you know it's natural for your mind to be moving around and be you know one if from moment to moment tense and relaxed focus on this or focus on that operating in this mode operating in that mode but just like the attention required of holding your your arm in a certain state you can remain in a hyper alert state focused one way or another one type of image held in your mind what have you there I'm not gonna give examples here but there are many different modes of meditation that have been associated with Buddhism again some orthodox some completely unorthodox and let me tell you something you're gonna feel tingling you're gonna feel a kind of a heightened state or hyper exhausted state or both you're gonna feel unusual sensations you're gonna feel an altered state of mind in a sense the tingling in your arm is an altered state of your arm what I mean you're it's it's a peculiar mode of feeling and mode of being even you know but it's meaningless and in the same way that I wouldn't ascribe these cultural values supernatural values in religious expectations to the tingling in my arm I wouldn't ascribe this you know in my mind either you've got to remain detached again detachment is a Buddhist you know a virtue and if that people really break down even when the conversation just got to that point you know where it's like look that because they agreed they didn't want to agree but they knew they knew what I was saying was true and these are people who love snores meditating so you know now I have also I've meditated at some of the most August and respected people for the spot of theories around the world and with of some famous Buddhist monks and so on you know I mean so I may be another reason where that image is compelling when I was saying it to other people who have that external that what I'm talking you know that it's not so different from tingling in your weight but in a sense it Israel I mean this is that this is the thing the tingling in your arm is real it's just meaningless it's not what you want it to be it's not anything more than what it is at the surface of reality to their dreams like you know III dreamed this so like you know right it's so important if you can't just be I've seen people respond that way if they have a dream about speaking to a deceased relative so they dream about speaking with their deceased mother or something and then they said what can't just be Turing was so meaningful what if it's just a dream and you like it you want it to be something which what if it's a dream plus wishful thinking cocaine - I'm sorry alcohol cocaine all of them all of them we tell the states of mind that be sure their people have gotten drunk and whole bunch of other things happen the night of change I sure no doubt yeah it doesn't mean that God lives in a bottle of whiskey it doesn't mean that God is at the bottom of a you know tab of LSD or something it doesn't mean that God is that God or some other religious meaning is hiding within these things yeah that's right anyway there are actually several steps further I can take that discussion that starts with the image of tingling and straining your arms during your brain but me I don't I don't think we have to in this video but um you know I just mentioned that kind of conversation with people who were really attached to meditation has often been devastating for them even though you can tell what I'm saying is not really dismissing meditation it's hourly but you don't even have to take it that way it's like well there were physical exercises and there are mental exercises that analysis of mine leaves some scope for this to be you know something other than you know something other than a scam but very often in our world in the 21st century meditation yes a scam precisely because it's being packaged and sold as something it's not and there's there is and it's an overused term cognitive dissonance is overused but a lot of Buddhists struggle with cognitive dissonance because whatever meditation practice they're doing they know is not squared with the ancient authentic form of meditation recorded in the texts and then what they're looking for in terms of outcomes the religious experience they want to have is maybe fundamentally on Buddhists you know what I mean what what you know some people want to have telepathic superpowers I've read I've read autobiographies where people admitted that that they got involved with meditation because they wanted to have supernatural powers and many traditions of Buddhism will promise you that you know Tibetan Buddhism and what-have-you some you know they or they thought it would make them smarter you know it's very human but very pathetic they thought well if I workout at the gym I get stronger if I workout in meditation I'll get smarter or gain these cognitive abilities they may believe that in a pseudoscience sense or they may believe it in a more supernatural and religious sense and but the Buddha didn't promise you any of this this is not this is not the the meditation he taught this is not the purpose of meditation as he taught it so a lot of people are walking around with with a kind of a kind of broken heart about their own religion and their own faith and they can't be honest with themselves about how the different pieces don't fit together that in a sense what they're believing in is a religion of their own invention and not a religion that the Buddha taught you know yeah my impression of meditation is one of the goals at least you know you mentioned these goals with higher intelligence or telepathic powers one is just mindfulness or feeling less attached to a situation so or just being able to see the broader picture so I think you are in an interesting position to give you know to discuss these matters with people that are really into Buddhism and meditation because you you didn't come to these late you know I know you're really well and I know that you have a lot of these like qualities that people are you're very intelligent you you know you're able to be very objective and rational about things and that you didn't come to that through meditation right I don't know that was partly why I was just like interested in asking this because like I don't know it to me it's just really impressive how you're able to stay so right grounded well I just think people don't see that about me on youtube to some extent cuz on youtube I do kind of clown around it's true and if anything I wallow in some of my emotions here and as a middle-aged person I have the luxury of wallowing and emotions on my character I don't I don't shut it out or what-have-you but it's true I'm a very detached person and has someone has come up in violent in stressful situations in real life it's it's true and it's true that's not a product of meditation so if as soon as we state what the desiderata of meditation are so meditation someone's undertaking meditation in order to achieve these qualities you mentioned but it could be any list of qualities or any any list of objectives we can then look at the mechanics of what the meditation is and what it's supposed to be so to give a definite historical example meditation as described by good at home pardon me Buddha Gosa Buddha cosa is the commentator on the Pali Canon he wrote what are called the commentaries so Buddha ghosa is not the same person as the put up there are two different historical figures but he has meditation practices where you sit in a room with a human skeleton and look at the skeleton he has meditation practices where you sit outdoors in the sunlight with a dish of water and then you remove the water and you just visualize the absent water we sit with a dish of Earth in sunlight and stare at the earth and then move the he outlines these these meditation practices why why would that help you if you go through those prayers just honestly ask so we can test it scientifically why would that help you deal with the circumstance such as a police officer being insulting and demeaning towards you and you said that's a really good example because a lot of people even if you think it's not gonna bother you to have a police officer in a position of authority and sole human demean you and treat you of it a lot of people they weren't expecting it but it really gets to them and they really get furious or you know you know and there's a lot there look in some ways it's relating to the schoolyard bully and someone's relating to your school teacher because this is someone authority and maybe you were expecting or demanding to be you know maybe implicitly a certain level will respect you feel this according to you a situation like that those are the real-world situations where detachment matters right how could that possibly be related to sitting and staring at a skeleton staring at addition water and so on now Buddha doses meditation is not the same as the Buddha's what the Buddha says limited the jhanas in the actual poly canon as i said in a recent video that's really you know transcendental in the sense of there's a whole East Natori component to it of actually seeing your past incarnations and of having these kind of almost indescribable visions of the sphere of formless things and what have you you know tell me what does the sphere of for most things look like you know what is the what is the sphere of neither form nor non form look like you know there's this sequence of spheres even the translation sphere by the way is very peculiar if you're looking at the original tally but anyway your mind is elevated up above the heavens and above the gods and indeed you're supposed to be able to go up and talk to the gods you're suppose to be able to teleport yourself up to the heavens and have conversations with Brahma and Indra and that's Pali canons full of that it's full of these kinds of supernatural dialogues you can put us monks and deities supernatural deities as well as magical beings here on earth like yetis and demons but anyway so that is a very rich mythological tradition how would it be connected to you know the real world situation of this police officer is being denigrating to me and you feel so angry or you lose control if you you know you lose your detachment or any other example that why you know why would one helping the other even if we uncritically believe in what the religious text is is telling us about about meditation yeah so yeah maybe to come back to my earlier point wrap it up this video it's already past 20 minutes but you know I said earlier briefly that if I were to contrast sort of the first half of my period as a poly scholar to the second half one of the differences was earlier on I was open to the fact I thought I was going to get out in the field do fieldwork do like anthropological research I was gonna meet Buddhist monks who had the Nirvana experience who had the experience of meditating and experiencing the jhanas in the different levels and who had maybe you know whether he think of as a hallucination or a dream or whatever who had seen their prior incarnations and you know and that this was a dream that although my perspective only a dream a dream that was a great historical significance because people had it again and again they had a 2000 years ago they had it 500 years ago and this was still happening this was a part of the human experience that people could still have today and again that that's only assuming this experience exists in the same sense that LSD exists or that dreams exist you know there's a scientific sense in which dreams exist and there's a sight there's a sense of which dreams are nevertheless unreal and we could say the same but these other things and for sure there was a subtle but profound change when I realized that no this experience is not even something that exists this is a myth a myth in the truest sense of the meaning of the word mythology and that sadly for 2,500 years all kinds of different people whether they hallucinate it or not whether they meditate or not in different ways they were groping around to reproduce this mythological experience and they couldn't even have it that there are no Buddhist monks today who even have the Nirvana experience as it's written out the ancient texts and that I think is the reason why in every generation there is so much innovation there are always new forms of meditation coming out because people in these positions of religious authority want to compensate for what they're lacking they're not having the Nirvana experience themselves they're not able to deliver that to their parishioners so instead they come up with something like the mahasaya dog you know experience my society I was a meditation leader and he came up with this totally original notion like having meditators sit and drink really slowly analyze what the drink tastes like also eating food in slow motion and walking in slow motion and you know supposedly you're supposed to realize that although the drink seems to be delicious so the food seems to be delicious when you slow it down and analyze it into its components you realize this is an illusion and it actually neither tastes good nor bad this is supposed to be an incident reality okay that's a totally new philosophy totally new meditative practice that has nothing to do with what the Buddha taught and is in a very real sense unbuttoned but that was an experience he could have and he could teach and he could share with others and that's what everyone's groping around for in this religion it's exactly because the nerve an experience is not available is not real it's not something that people are experiencing that they're desperately looking for something to substitute for it to supplant it with and that's why meditation means different things to different people in different cultures and why even now you know that there's this constant source of innovation for the profound experience nobody is having I said Nirvana is a myth that is much more meaningful than Noah's Ark it's much more meaningful than Moses going up to the top of the mountain and taking up the tablets it's a myth you know that promises you that the riddle to the meaning of life and indeed to the cosmology of the universe gods and men angels and demons the living and the dead this great cycle of reincarnation that the riddle to all this can be understood by you if only you can comprehend the the nature of desire itself and tear up desire by its roots and then you're gonna have this world shattering insight this transcendental experience and that's not true and it's never been true