I have been told that Trungpa said "they always run".
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!
There is something very cultish about it. An indication of it being a cult is the tendency to get caught up in definitions of new words. It is easy to think that once you learn the vocabulary (like "vipassana", "sati", or whatever), you are have achieved something, when all you are doing is reciting new words but the thinking is done for you.
Well… it's literally a religion. And those are just foreign words.
McMindfulness (the stuff you'd get corporate trainings about) doesn't teach you any of those words, uses several different techniques at once, gives regular people little bits of the techniques used for monks to develop revulsion for all earthly things, etc.
Seems like having revulsion for all earthly things can backfire in unpredictable ways. I have a suspicion that the early Buddhist may have been onto something, but something vital was lost a long time ago.
It's good if you're a monk. It's not good if you're a lay person.
Ancient (Pali canon) Buddhism is different from Asian Buddhism, but modernist American Buddhism is pretty different from that too.
(Although, a lot of Asian Buddhism is basically copied from European philosophy; when the Europeans showed up, Asia had to cook up something they'd count as a religion in a hurry so they wouldn't count as savages and get colonized.)
I think you're conflating the concentration and insight jhanas/meditative practices. What you said about losing the sense of self is true of the insight jhanas, but "mindfulness" as a meditative practice is more reminiscent of concentration. Also, it's not like "losing the sense of self" is always bad for you; it depends how deep your attachment to the self was in the first place. Sīla (moral and ethical practice) and intellectual insights like Stoicism can help you gradually loosen the notion that a personal self must be integral to existence, without abandoning it completely.
> The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench.
I found quite a few signs of egotism in the writer, so I'm not surprised that he experienced a great wrench in confronting his sense of selfhood. And then lashes out at the teachings and practices he had previously rushed to embrace.
Realisation of no self (anatta) would be canonically fit into vipssana meditation whereas mindfulness (sati) is something done for concentration practice
I did a lot of mindfulness sitting practice. We were specifically directed not to attempt concentration. There's more than one kind of mindfulness, and more than one kind of vipassana. I was mainly taught vipassana as something that arises naturally from shamatha; but I've been on courses where it was taught as a systematic exploration of the skhandas, to convince yourself that there is no self in the five skhandas.
I've also been to McMindfulness groups, where they blended shamatha-type mindfulness with guided vipassana meditation. It makes no sense to me, to teach vipassana divorced from the no-self doctrine, and all the abhidharma ideas about the skhandas and the different kinds of consciousness.
Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
> There's more than one kind of mindfulness, and more than one kind of vipassana
Definitely true, by itself sati/smrti is a hard-to-translate term.
> Shamatha is "calm abiding", which I think is what the McMindfulness crowd are trying to teach. It should really be treated as a sort of universal preliminary for most other types of meditation. But it's perfectly reasonable to treat shamatha as your main practice (as I did).
I am mostly focussing on some breathing mindfulness meditation and some metta, not much, but enough that I feel a calming effect, and I overall am trying to foster some 'buddhist values' in my life.
> I was told that chöd is a specifically Tibetan practice; I don't know what it would be called in Sanskrit. It's a visualisation practice, in which you imagine chopping up your body and your senses, and make an offering of them. I've never tried it; I was told it's scary. I was also told it's sutrayana, although the visualisation makes it sound vajrayana. I guess chöd is a kind of vipassana?
I heard of meditating on your 'own decaying body' definitely from a theravada context, but was overall warned that meditation objects from the imagination are more risky overall for psychological emergencies.
No idea what Bhante Vimalaramsi is. I used the term as a synonym for sravakayana; I think I probably used it incorrectly, it should probably include a lot of mahayana practice (because mahayana sutras). Maybe it just means "practices that don't depend on revealed teachings". At any rate, "not tantrayana".
Ah, Bhante Vimalaramsi is an american monk originally from the theravada tradition who IIRC uses Sutrayana for his take on what the Pali canon says, as he deviates from the theravada interpretation of the text.
The context was people on retreats jumping up from their meditation cushion and running away as fast as they can, not to reach some destination, but just to escape. I've never witnessed this, but I never did many retreats.
The practice wasn't the jhanas, it was meditation on emptiness. The idea is that when you achieve a certain level of realisation into emptiness, a sudden and irreversible change occurs, like a seismic shift, which results in terror. The practioner runs mainly to get away from the place where it happened (i.e., the cushion). Apparently they keep running until they feel safe.
I was told that the jhanas (roughly, single-pointed concentration) were particularly risky, because it's easy to do them wrong. Note that the jhanas are not a type of mindfulness practice; the author seems to conflate them.
> mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.
The fundamental purpose of mindfulness practice in Buddhism is to convince yourself that your sense of selfhood is false. Because we are so strongly attached to the sense of selfhood, achieving that conviction is going to be a wrench. In western psychology, the loss of a sense of selfhood is called "dissociation", and is a pathology. McMindfulness ignores all that.
I once had negative experiences of meditation on emptiness; I was told to stop doing it. I'm quite certain that my experiences were not the result of any realisation!