the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation.However, it’s critical of meditation.
Possibly obvious, but seems worth noting explicitly: that paper discusses the result of some very advanced meditative states, which usually need to be pursued with serious intent. It shouldn’t be considered a criticism of meditation as a whole, given that there are a lot of benefits that typically show up much before one gets to the realm of non-symbolic stuff and which are more objectively verifiable. Also, not all meditative practices even have non-symbolic states as their goal.
Note also that even in that paper, the disconnect between internal experience and actual externally-reported signs of bodily/emotional awareness was only reported in three interviewees out of 50, and that the memory loss stuff only started showing up around the last stage, which several traditions were noted to stop short of.
(I also suspect that there may have been a bit of a disconnect in the language used by the interviewer and the interviewees: I think I might have had a few brief glimpses of what a non-symbolic state feels like, and one thing in particular that I would still have emotions as normal, but I’d just be less bothered by negative ones. When the researcher quoted an interviewee saying that he felt calm, but his partner reported him to be obviously stressed, he wasn’t necessarily mistaken, just talking about a different thing: he could have been aware of all of his actual reactions, just feeling calm in a different sense, as he didn’t feel bad over feeling bad. Hoping to elaborate on that in a future post, once I manage to finish it.)
the most valuable thing I’ve ever read about meditation. However, it’s critical of meditation.
Possibly obvious, but seems worth noting explicitly: that paper discusses the result of some very advanced meditative states, which usually need to be pursued with serious intent. It shouldn’t be considered a criticism of meditation as a whole, given that there are a lot of benefits that typically show up much before one gets to the realm of non-symbolic stuff and which are more objectively verifiable. Also, not all meditative practices even have non-symbolic states as their goal.
Note also that even in that paper, the disconnect between internal experience and actual externally-reported signs of bodily/emotional awareness was only reported in three interviewees out of 50, and that the memory loss stuff only started showing up around the last stage, which several traditions were noted to stop short of.
(I also suspect that there may have been a bit of a disconnect in the language used by the interviewer and the interviewees: I think I might have had a few brief glimpses of what a non-symbolic state feels like, and one thing in particular that I would still have emotions as normal, but I’d just be less bothered by negative ones. When the researcher quoted an interviewee saying that he felt calm, but his partner reported him to be obviously stressed, he wasn’t necessarily mistaken, just talking about a different thing: he could have been aware of all of his actual reactions, just feeling calm in a different sense, as he didn’t feel bad over feeling bad. Hoping to elaborate on that in a future post, once I manage to finish it.)