Debating Meditation with Buddhists: the Fallacy of Having Faith in a Feeling…

hey guys there was a time when I got
asked this question a lot and now here I am years later answering a lot of suppose I used to get asked all the time in person face-to-face by email what I thought of a Buddhist meditation what my own experiences were and what my advice was for other people and I'm really answering it now because I'm in a new relationship with a new girlfriend and just in the last couple of days we've been talking a lot about the history of Buddhism in general my own experiences of former scholar of Buddhism and what my position on these various topics may be so in this way in a relaxed down-to-earth fashion just record another long video with my girlfriend discussing what my position on meditation isn't isn't and it occurs to me that I could make short video here just discussing how I have in the past directly face-to-face with Buddhists and of course sometimes by email debated the issue of meditation so this is not a hypothetical debate this is not what would you say as a secular atheist what would you say as a nihilist if you were to sit down and talk about these things with Buddhists I have talked with these things that Buddhists these are this video was gonna summarize the type of conversation debate that I've had in Thailand that I've had in Sri Lanka that I've had in Canada that I've had with people who describe themselves as secular scholars of Buddhism people with PhDs and that I've had with Buddhist monks you know wearing the full uniform wearing the robe formally preaching Buddhism with no pretense of being secular outside of the religion and of course that I've discussed with laypeople in between in my other video at some more length I mentioned very simple fundamental issue of feeling tingling in your arm if you flex the muscle in your arm very simple point but in contrast to all of the hallowed cultural assumptions religious assumptions supernatural assumptions that are added on to altered states of mind experiences in your mind you might have when meditating that are just a little bit out of the ordinary I point out first and foremost in these discussions that simply if you if you flex the muscles your arm and hold it if you just create that tension in your arm until you can't hold it anymore you just put strain put stress on those organs in a slightly unfamiliar way at the end of that process you get a strange sense of tingling but I do not add any other meanings on to that I regard that as meaningless is it so surprising that if you put a certain type of unfamiliar strain on your mind holding a particular thought holding a particular image a particular attitude thinking in a particular way a particular focus particularly focused way or what-have-you there are many many different types of meditation some of them could be described as focusing the mind some of them can be described as unfocused in the mind but in any case just like it doesn't really matter if you are flexing the arm like this or if you're flexing in another position it's just the strain of holding your arm in any position is gonna produce tingling of some kind your mind is an organ your mind is a product of biological evolution your mind naturally left to its own devices is going to flit from one attitude to another from one mood to another it's gonna respond to stimuli and pretty much all forms of Buddhist meditation you might even extend this to Hindu meditation and other religions they're based on a notion of constricting the mind in brief putting strain and stress on the mind in one of several unfamiliar ways or switching between unfamiliar ways and yes that can produce tingling it can produce unfamiliar sensations caused by that strain itself or caused by the relief at the end of that period of strain when you relax the mind when you cease to hold that image in your mind when you cease to think in that peculiar way now again I mentioned in the other video a much longer video sometimes the people I was talking to had a really extreme emotional rush to this really extreme one in one case it was just by email but I later found out from the person person doctor so I knew that they wept at that time and then they wept when telling the intermediary person you got the story to me they found this really devastating just this line of inquiry and indeed you know I am an experienced toy people face-to-face we're already at this stage I think partly because what I'm saying resonates with the experience these Buddhist practitioners have had it resonates with their own experience meditating and partly because the philosophy of Buddhism itself in terms of its critique of mind and body and so on that also in some ways prepares them for this skeptical approach to the merely empirical experience of what they've felt and what they've seen while meditating right and note this isn't disputing that they've felt unusual things I mean the point is yes if you strain the body in a peculiar way you're gonna have peculiar feelings tingling what-have-you if you strain the mind in a peculiar way either than gonna have some peculiar feelings but why are we assigning transcendental significance to them why are we assigning magical significance to them what is the dotted line that connects these unfamiliar sensations with any particular philosophy the philosophy of Buddhism the philosophy of Catholicism or you know your previous incarnations in a prior life all the mythology that gets attached to these fleeting sensations that are induced in the mind through these exercises the second image I've employed in these debates was of a man carrying a heavy stone on his back while walking back and forth in a room now again if you know Buddhism this image comes pretty close to some some imagery we use within Buddhist philosophy within Buddhist dogmatix if you like you know you may not have this experience as a form of exercise but if you're carrying a heavy stone on your back whether you're walking up a hill or walking back forth or whatever that the scenario is when you put that stone down there were remarkable feelings in the human body feelings of elation feelings of feelings of liberation even you know on a physical level and also on a mental and emotional level you know putting down a heavy stone that you've been carrying if you really had this experience viscerally as well as kind of psycho emotionally it's remarkable what what an impact that can have on you so yeah this is this image is not hypothetical Fiat what I mean this is really empirical experience we're talking about but if you do that if you give yourself that exercise to give yourself that challenge you decide to carry a heavy stone up the hill and then you put it down you may I mean the moment you put down that stone you may spring up and have a trim you certainly feel very light on your feet you know you spring up and you feel elated you feel joy you feel liberated from the you feel liberated from the literal oppression of having this stone you're back what what does that really mean you know again the issue with the tingling in the arm I'm not disputing that you feel that way but I'm challenging you you've put yourself in this very unnatural situation where in your body and your mind you're inducing these feelings and there's a sense of there's a sense of which they're real you know I mean I'm not gonna tell you that's an unreal feeling like many other forms of you know athletic exertion just mountain climbing you know mountain climbing especially knowing it very very high altitudes with thin air and so on all kinds of people actually have you know anecdotes of the exhaustion and oxygen deprivation even inducing hallucinations but sense a sense of euphoria a sense of you know joy and so on you can have all these very strange emotional reactions to just this kind of physical strain put on the body and again most the time when I was speaking to experienced Buddhist practitioners whether they were laypeople or monks whether they had PhDs and spent their time in university or if they spend their time literally in a cave and the mountains you know um whatever the background was I normally didn't have to spell out the rest of the argument for them what is the dotted line connecting this physical sense this mood this feeling to the philosophy you claim to the supernatural cosmology you claim yeah and as say a lot of people I talk to you about extreme emotional reactions to this and they've recognized the truth of what I was saying perhaps just because the approach to the issue I was demonstrating was itself aesthetically and structurally so similar to the way the classical put his philosophy itself raises these questions engaged these things um as soon as we're addressing feelings as feelings all of the pretensions of Buddhist philosophy fall apart if we're just able to address the outcomes of these meditative methods as feelings not as spheres I mean a lot of people will use this kind of fit clang guack not as another plane of existence but just as feelings as soon as you get people to recognize that then already what they've recognized is they're engaged in an exercise that's no more supernatural than flexing your arm or carrying a rock on your back back and forth across the floor they've engaged in exercise that is in many ways much more pointless than for example practicing mathematics on a chalkboard you know with a piece of chalk or many other says we could do that do strain the mind in one way or another it's a completely abstract dead ended and pointless form of stress and strain that they've put on their minds to no particular end except that exhaustion a type of exhaustion not so different from carrying the rock back and forth just so they can have the experience of liberation from that exhaustion when they place that rock down and I don't even deny the feeling of liberation I don't deny the feeling of ecstasy they may have I don't deny the hallucinate hallucinatory experiences may have had also what I insist on is that this liberation in itself is meaningless and that they have had a set of cultural and religious presuppositions that they try to attach to this experience and in fact the experience they've had has nothing more to do with Buddhism than it has to do with Catholicism or communism or any other ideology the experience fails to validate the ideology and the ideology itself also fails to provide the experience it would be as absurd as carrying that stone up a mountain putting the stone down then feeling so elated feeling this rush of energy vitality what have you this joy to be liberated after after putting down the stone and then turning around and worshipping that stone as your God