I have spent the last two years spending most of my weekends landscaping, which involves hours spent trudging up and down a hill carrying buckets of rocks and mud, and digging holes. My husband cannot understand how I will do this for hours without air pods or a podcast. I have to think hard and focus all day for my job, and doing this completely mindless but physically difficult work has been completely addicting for me. I actually can't wait to get out there on the weekends and move dirt and rocks and plant things. I am positive it has saved my mental health. In winter when the ground is frozen and I can't do as much, my migraines come back. The more exhausted and blistered and sunburnt I get the rest of the year, the more they start to disappear. It's been a revelation. Bravo 👏
I also get headaches if I don't go out. The limit tends to be at noon. If I haven't been outdoors by that time I tend to get a dizzy feeling that doesn't go away until next morning. Until last year I believed it was something with the lack of light indoors or maybe poor air quality. Then I spent almost two months indoors because I had to finish plastering and painting works before New Year and I didn't get any headaches. For that reason I tend to believe that lack of exercise and too much near-seeing could be the most important reasons.
I believe that all human zoos should allow daytime outdoor exercise.
Most comments here seem to be from people much more knowledgable than I, but I have been reading and listening a lot to books on Buddhism and it seems to me your article misses the point.
The point of meditation is not to "not think". It is to train the mind to think "better".
The part that is mistakenly called "not thinking" is to train the mind to be very focused on a single thing (usually the breath) and not to be distracted by every passing thought.
Mindfulness (another widely and wrongly used term) is then used to "see" things that we usually ignore, thus gaining better understanding of our experience in this world.
I am very much a novice, but I was already blown away (and my life changed a little to the better) by some truths that I worked very hard to not notice during my lifetime and suddenly did notice and accepted using these practices.
One such example is the distinction between physical pain and suffering. I think this is reflected in the story about the canoe.
Just because you are in pain doesn't mean something is wrong and needs fixing. This is something quite simple that I have not noticed for many decades, and I see most people around me still equate "pain" (or discomfort, or annoyance) with a moral "badness".
>>Just because you are in pain doesn't mean something is wrong and needs fixing. This is something quite simple that I have not noticed for many decades, and I see most people around me still equate "pain" (or discomfort, or annoyance) with a moral "badness".
That is a great insight. But personally I'm feeling a bit annoyed by the idea that suffering is voluntary, for one reason: Childbirth. Since the 1950s pregnant women have been taught that they can choose to see labor pains in a different light than other kinds of pain and not suffer from them for real. And I'm sure some people can actually do that. But for most people it is only possible to decouple lighter pain from suffering. Not very heavy pain like labor pains (labor pains are very different for different people but... I think you get my point). So although I actually like the idea that pain can be decoupled from suffering, I also think it has been misused a lot.
It's not that pain can be detached from suffering (also that would be great) it's that suffering is not in itself "bad" and needs to be rectified at all costs.
Childbirth is actually a great example of that - it hurts a lot (so I'm told), but it's _supposed_ to hurt, so actually if you're hurting then everything is going according to plan.
>>so actually if you're hurting then everything is going according to plan.
To some extent, yes. The problem is the ideal that women in labor should comport themselves with the calmness and dignity of a Buddhist monk because the pain is "positive pain" or some other bullshit. Above a certain level of intensity, it becomes very difficult to perceive pain more than one way. I'm sure some people can, but to ask something like that from the vast majority of people is just cruel.
To expect everyone to be enlightened is dumb. To expect women to deal with one of the most painful things humans experience with equanimity and total inner peace because maybe a few women claim that they are able to is really annoying.
But to say that it's something people can work *towards* is totally awesome and cool. Not sure if that bothers you or why it would.
Also: meditation emphasizes increased awareness on a much finer level than you get from doing work.
Altho of course physical work can be a very meditative state qualitatively, and criticism of upper class people going to fancy resorts to meditate when they never do manual labor is super fair, the kind of meditative state you get from working just doesn't have the same potential for profound growth.
I grew up on a farm working outdoors with my body all the time, and I have done a ten day meditation course through dhamma.org, if that matters.
I've both meditated and carried out repetitive physical work for years. I'll confirm your sense that the mental state one achieves chopping wood and carrying water ( https://wildsimplejoy.com/enlightenment-chop-wood-carry-water-meaning/ ) is indeed a light version of basic meditation, though it feels better because of the way it engages the muscles and engenders a feeling of accomplishment. However, at least in my experience, it's really nothing compared to the first jhana, which feels like sunbeams infusing one's entire being.
It's somewhat challenging for me to reach the first jhana, and conditions haven't been favorable enough to support meditation in several months. But when I did achieve it, the first jhana felt satisfying in the sense that I didn't just want to keep meditating perpetually. It doesn't get boring; it's like exercise in the sense that once you're done, you feel like that's enough and you don't want to continue.
I've read meditators describe a sense of dissatisfaction that remains throughout their practice, no matter how deep they go, that can only be extinguished by enlightenment. I have a suspicion that they're just dissatisfied complainers. I've never been past the first jhana, but in that state I felt emotionally and physically suffused with joy, and I wasn't aware of anything like dissatisfaction - my sense is that you can't be aware of anything else, because to reach the first jhana I have to turn my complete and total focus on a slight sensation of pleasure, which doesn't leave much room for anything else.
Overall, I'd say that if you haven't meditated, there is an experience that you don't quite understand, in just the same way that it's hard to know what, say, marijuana is like without having tried it. The lower level of meditation is *like* losing oneself in work, but even this lighter state is more peaceful and more relaxing, and there's actually a kind of hyper-alertness to internal states. Caffeine facilitates hard work, but I could never meditate on caffeine.
Maybe the biggest difference between meditation and repetitive physical labor is that work generates a more alexithymic state, because of the focus on tangible things like snow to be shoveled, screws to be driven, or wood to be cut. Discomfort fades away, but judgment and questioning remains. With meditation there's a hyperawareness of almost everything; judgment and questioning are the only things that are suspended.
Reading what you write, I get the impression that meditation is a way to practice non-complaining.
As we all know, working is also a way to practice non-complaining, but as you say, it is incomplete: People who like to complain can work and complain at the same time. Perceiving-without-complaining is not the main focus of work, just a side effect.
So I wonder if maybe meditation could be a way establish a habit to stop judging things all the time? In that case I guess it should benefit people who have too many opinions to enjoy life (which is what Sam Harris described and I didn't understand).
> So I wonder if maybe meditation could be a way establish a habit to stop judging things all the time? In that case I guess it should benefit people who have too many opinions to enjoy life (which is what Sam Harris described and I didn't understand).
Sort of, yes. Meditation is a good way for people who are stressed, or innately miserable, to pacify themselves and minimize the intellectual triggers that cause negative emotions. Frequent meditation under externally stressful conditions has occasionally led me to experience depersonalized states where I begin watching myself take routine actions as a passenger in my own body, or a spectator in a movie. Other people feel stressed almost all the time because of thoughts that arise internally - thoughts about possible dangers, embarrassing memories, self-criticism, and so on. Meditation can help with this by quieting the thoughts that lead to emotional reactions.
You seem like the sort of person who wouldn't really derive much benefit from meditation, but you might know someone who would. The trick, of course, would be getting such a person to take their medicine!
>>Other people feel stressed almost all the time because of thoughts that arise internally - thoughts about possible dangers, embarrassing memories, self-criticism, and so on
I guessed there were such people behind the lines of Sam Harris' book. Why would thoughts be considered bad, if some people didn't have very bad thoughts all the time?
>>You seem like the sort of person who wouldn't really derive much benefit from meditation, but you might know someone who would.
I can guess who you mean. And he thinks it is stupid to be too happy.
> Why would thoughts be considered bad, if some people didn't have very bad thoughts all the time?
It's the emotions that overwhelm some people as a result of their thoughts that are the real problem, I think. Meditation doesn't only still thoughts, it also calms a person emotionally.
> I can guess who you mean. And he thinks it is stupid to be too happy.
Anders? He actually didn't cross my mind!
But you can tell him that at least in terms of productivity, most people are suboptimally happy; here's a study that found making people happy improves productivity 12%, and people suffering from bereavement are less productive: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/35451/1/522164196.pdf
Can you describe what you do when you are engaged in a jhana practice? You alluded to it a bit when you mentioned bringing "complete and total focus on a slight sensation of pleasure," but I'm curious, what is the character of the focus that you reference? Would you characterize it as intellectual, emotional, physical or something else entirely?
Roughly, it's an intellectual focus that causes an emotional or physical sensation.
More accurately, I'd describe the first Jhana as a perceptual focus that causes a perceived sensation. In order to achieve it, it usually takes me ~30 minutes of meditation quieting my thoughts, relaxing my limbs, and focusing my attention on myself and the area around me. Only after my attention becomes sufficiently focused and my internal distractions quiet am I able to sigh, smile, and search around for a positive feeling somewhere. Usually I can find some hint of pleasure either in the low emotional rumble of my feelings, in the muscles of my smiling face, or in my hands, arms, or feet. When I "look" at that sensation and maintain a quiet, sustained attention on it, the sensation either slips away, or begins to grow and expand until it's so overwhelming that I drop it, or else, if I can maintain focus on it, it expands into euphoria that washes over me in waves.
Lots of people have written about this; for example: https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/26525/how-to-complete-the-first-jhana While a lot of them are Buddhists who follow specific teachings described with a rich vocabulary, I can tell you don't have to do it that way. Just spend what feels like a long time relaxing, calming your thoughts, and building the ability to sustain your attention; then focus your attention on pleasure until the sensation engulfs you.
I think scrolling on social media is an attempt to meditate, with the disadvantage that you don't get anything out of it versus building something over time with work.
I read the first parts of that book very recently. I can't say I didn't like it. Especially the anthropologist in me liked Robert Pirsig's observations of people around him and their way of reasoning. But it is a very long book (or it felt that way) so I only read the first part. Also because I felt a bit emotionally disturbed by reading about the boy who would later become a victim of murder.
However, my mother says that when that book was new, when she was 19 years old, she read it and it changed her world view. She says that by then, the technical mindset that Robert Pirsig advocated was something new. By then, complaining as a lifestyle was seen as completely normal and Robert Pirsig described an alternative to that, she says.
I read the book in the mid to late '70s. Maybe when I too was about 19. I was impressed and thought it quite wise while still being a well written yarn, though I felt somewhat sorry for the guy he was travelling with. Beyond that I can't summon any substantive memories of its content. Being in to hitchhiking I also read Kerouac's 'On the the Road' about which left similarly fuzzy memories.
It is the 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' radio series that I recall vividly from that time (in 1980 it played over the NZ TV test pattern after the 1pm (radio) news bulletin. Its wry observations about humanity were revelatory (and very funny).
As an aside, one of my Grandfathers meditated daily. He started either in Mesopotamia during WWI or in India shortly after. I think as a way to reduce his propensity to 'worry'.
Thank you for taking up the reading and writing this review. I really enjoyed it.
"My guess is that the “I” Sam Harris is talking about is not that anonymous doer, but an entity that takes form in the friction with the “you” and “he” and “she” and “them”."
I think he is talking about both, and while I imagine many people would like to lubricate away the friction referenced in the latter, I agree that few set out to rid themselves of the former; however, I took Harris (among others) as suggesting that seeing through the one reveals the illusory aspect of the other. I don't think the project is oriented toward establishing or even encountering any particular state (though some unusual ones seem likely to emerge); instead, it seems oriented toward a transformation in the mode of perception (i.e. epiphany).
Did you ever believe in Santa Claus growing up? I did. I ardently believed in Santa Claus and persisted in the belief to an age that I think became uncomfortable for my parents. I still remember when my mom sat me down on the couch and told me the truth. It rocked my world--far more profoundly than I think she ever could have anticipated. In one fell swoop, the world was disenchanted and magic became make believe. It laid the groundwork for my eventual turn toward atheism: an outcome that deeply wounded both my parents. And yet, I still love Santa. I love Christmas and have perpetuated the myth for all of my children--something I absolutely could not have done if I still believed in him in the way I did as a child.
My suspicion is that Harris and other practitioners of particular forms of meditation are suggesting that a similar epiphany is available vis a vis the ego. I don't believe in Santa, and in so not believing in him, I am far more effective at keeping him alive. I continue to believe in the ego as I once believed in Santa and I wonder if perhaps that belief is what saps the vitality from the living.
Thank you for starting it all through urging me to take a look at meditation.
>>Did you ever believe in Santa Claus growing up?
I don't remember much of it myself, but my mother has an anecdote about it: She always told me that Santa Claus didn't exist, because she was a rational atheist. Then, when I was a few years old, we were at the "open pre-school" and who came in through the door if not Santa Claus himself? I got scared and hid and afterwards I was very upset and accused my mother of having lied to me. "You fooled me, you said that Santa didn't exist and I saw him", my mother reports that I said to her. She, always the good empiricist, felt the need to apologize and say that she just didn't know that he existed. The only thing I remember myself of all this is the scary big Santa Claus figure. Later, I must have understood that empiricism is a bit more complicated than that and thereby finished believing in Santa Claus again. But it probably was a painless process because I don't remember it.
>>I don't believe in Santa, and in so not believing in him, I am far more effective at keeping him alive. I continue to believe in the ego as I once believed in Santa and I wonder if perhaps that belief is what saps the vitality from the living.
Very interesting. So what we are talking about is, essentially, self-distance, if we translate it into everyday language? Then I think I get it, because taking one's own perspective too seriously without constantly relativizing it really saps the vitality from life.
Compare Devotee-ism (like many protestant Christianities). This is a different example of soteriological frameworks for self/help or religion-as-a-psyche-salve (and not a government department for thought control and obedience like Catholic & Orthodox Christianities).
From what I can tell, the renunciate/salvation religions (Karen Armstrong and Karl Jaspers called them Axial religions) were an evolutionary adaptation to the chaotic, violent social conditions (increased tribal wars) that evolved as a result of the Bronze Age collapse. New technologies such as metals, wagons, chariots and agriculture disrupted pre-monotheistic, "pagan" and tribal social forms, creating the need for a better "sense making" system.
Axial religion probably emerged in agrarian city-states as a response to both war and to the need to control peasant and slave populations to ensure social order and strong defenses against marauding pagans and attacks by other city-states, or empires and dynasties.
As paleo-libertarian historian Leonard Liggio explained*, before 1492, Catholicism's function was supra-national (and "classically liberal" in places) in the context of decentralized politics, before the centralized empire was re-established (first by Spain) and the modern nation state system emerged.
After 1492, the messy, decentralized forms of medieval/feudal "classical liberalism" (cortes, fueros, communas, rule of law replacing fealty oaths) were swept aside by Isabella's "modern" reforms meant to strengthen national unity via linguistic conformism and standardization (and Absolutism, aka "oriental despotism").
Recentralization of imperial power and colonialism led to the destruction of classically liberal ideas (especially "liberty") and quasi-democratic practices (and decentralized power) that emerged before 1492. Other historians have pointed out a similar process in the German Free Cities and the Hanseatic League in which classical liberalism flourished under decentralized politics.
Joseph Henrich explained classical liberalism's origins in his W.E.I.R.D. model: the Church's abolition of cousin marriage, the establishment of the nuclear family and Manorialism and technological advances and increased literacy, and the expansion of river and sea trade and the urban commoner classes led to the development of high-social-trust institutions, such as formal courts of law, insurance, parliaments, and so forth.
The idea that religion was an impediment to progress is relatively recent historically, a product of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and Marxism.
One libertarian historian even claims that the revival of pagan resistance to state power was behind the Enlightenment. (but of course pagans had their own religions.)
The Cathars and Troubadours of Languedoc and vicinity are presumably a similar influence.
[Augustin] Thierry’s historical contributions show how rights emerged in the great religious movements of the Peace of God and the Gregorian Reformation, and were consolidated in the oath-bound associations creating town-charters and representative institutions. In the debris of the Carolingian Empire and its tradeless feudal system, there arose commerce, industry, with watermills and windmills and private property in land. The feudal institutions were challenged by the oath-bound associations, usually led by abbots or bishops. Contract and consent became the center of the struggle against the feudal institutions of autarkic economy. In the conflict against feudalism, the emerging market forces of commerce and agriculture created the edifice of medieval legal and constitutional institutions.
See also https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/inappropriation which is an aside, on reading Jörg Rüpke’s _On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome_ which outlines how Christianity's focus on individualism (to be very rough about it) was realigned with an imperial cult of obedience to those anointed (as ruler and pontiff) to out-maneuver more local identities like cities and their mores, and city or ethnic based gods (the Jewish rejection of the Emperor as god is part of this history). Orthodox Christianity is basically a government department, Catholicism is an orthodox church gone rogue (set up as it was by expelled extremists from Constantinople). For modern day examples of Orthodoxy, obedience and an imperial method, just look at Putin's Moscovite empire and it's use of Russian orthodoxy in removing individual agency that is not aligned with the state (among other methods).
It is interesting that the success of the Roman state in eventually imposing the Imperial cult is sometimes blamed for the dissolution of said empire. Maybe letting individuals do their own research is why Orthodox/Catholic regard fideism as a heresy as it undermines obedience. Making Christianity an imperial church removed it devotee-ist origins. The protestant return to devotee-ist forms (Jesus is Lord!)(Except for High Anglicanism which is an English Orthodxy) should not be overlooked.
Personally I think the institutionalization of narcissism and psychopathy we witness in any imperial cult (one leader, one faith, one god, one folk, one one oneness one) will always led to the death cult end we see in Guyana or in Russia today.
Interesting, thanks! Do you think the vicious attacks on the “gnostics” that wrote the Nag Hammadi texts expose the power plays that went on as the church was being established?
well, might be too early as texts per se, but were possibly hidden in that period of the imperial phase of take-over or taking-on of Christianity, hidden in response to the creation of top-down orthodoxy, (I am no scholar of ancient texts) but I do think they were mostly pre- or at least not- Pauline aligned texts, in any case.
Early on when Christianity was not very distinct from Jewish forms, the Jewish religion was thought to be the fastest growing religion in the Eastern Mediterranean, so it was an expanding Jewish but Greek speaking population/market which provided a substrate or community for Pauline Christianity to move out over, and be understood by, which becomes the form that Constantine chooses, as imperial cult in 313 AD, then St Augustine develops the framework for the church version of Christianity as a City of God (no middleware of city or ethnicity cults/communities between believers/obeyers and the Emperor) which is established as the only allowed religion when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. One emporer, one faith, one god. Beckwith reckons this invention, or suite of one-ness is a Scythian invention that played out across Eurasia in the axial age bracket,
it should be noted that some argue that the top down selection of orthodoxy did not really suppress Christian theological disputations, some say it was so interminable the next one thing (Islam) was accepted to shut them all up, but this did not last long either.
I suspect the lives of the older upper classes were similar enough to modern white collar work that meditation was necessary for them. Capitalism has just expanded the scope of people it’s good for!
The "woke" "left" , which is primarily the "professional-managerial class" (PMC, Ehrenreich) tends to form into a quasi-religious, elite priestly cult (above the traditional industrial class and above the traditional white collar class), as Joel Kotkin calls it, the New Clerisy, that dictates values, tastes, morals, etc.
Classical meditation is usually associated with introspection and radical self-skepticism, if not rejection of ego and attachments to bad (ungodly) emotions and ideas. "Woke" is the opposite of that, it is a cult of bad emotions and ideas: the Dark Triad (sociopathy, narcissism, hunger for power).
But it is correct that the material and class base of any group's ideology largely determines its nature, ideas and values and how it justifies its use of power.
Historical "leftism", including Marxism was "conservative" in the sense that it saw, just as the Ancine Regime did, classic liberalism as a middle class, bourgeois revolution by the expanding medieval middle class (river and sea traders) that were literate, but not refined.
The "woke" elites (the PMC) now has continued that elite stance and the recycling of old, anti-liberal, anti-middle class, anti-property owning ideas and values of a faux priest class.
Anyways, as Nietzsche said, what followed the "death of God" is likely to be worse than what went before it, even more psychic damage. My guess is that Harris looked at meditation as a potential medical treatment for the spiritual and psychological problems left in the wake of the death of God. (I define "spiritual" as the traditional path to fulfilling the ancient human need for communion*, social cooperation, shared learning, meaning and purpose.)
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* Peter Richerson, PhD ecology, UC Davis, quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of sympathy in "primeval times"):
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
Charles Darwin himself believed in human group selection! I had no idea. But why wouldn't he? He was very good at thinking and the idea is logically obvious.
There have been a series of controversies for decades in sociobiology and evolutionary theory in which the “left” advances fake science such as the “blank slate”, and then real scientists debunk the junk science. The good science falls under the general category of gene-culture coevolution, also known as “dual inheritance” theory.
There are levels to consciousness and awareness. People can achieve these deeper states in all sorts of ways (eg. sitting still, during times of intense trauma/suffering, praying, etc).
Meditation is one of many paths that offer a direct experience, and not be force-fed a mental concept, of this truth: "I am" (an awareness/observer beyond the mental voice, emotions, pain, physical body, or any other "input").
While the type of work you describe is obviously "more zen" than being stressed at the same tasks, you can go deeper/further and let go of mental/physical blockages by observing your mind instead of giving it work.
>>While the type of work you describe is obviously "more zen" than being stressed at the same tasks, you can go deeper/further and let go of mental/physical blockages by observing your mind instead of giving it work.
Yes. Working is rather basic. If people can't reach the most advanced mental experiences through working that is quite natural, since getting the job done is a limiting factor in itself.
Your meditative work state sounds a lot like what is described as "flow". (About "flow", there is a lot of pompous stuff written.)
> Not in the modern sense, through negotiating all day long with people in an office
It's possible that with a lot of the modern "professional class" there's very little flow-state work, with anything repetitive enough that one could do it systematically and efficiently without constant analysis either automated our outsourced to less-well-paid people.
note: "orange" is a modern rationalism is Clare Graves "Spiral Dynamics" scheme, and "green" is postmodern relativism/pluralism.
excerpt:
The thing is, orange [modern rationalism] and green [postmodernism] are both right.
They are also both wrong. Their virulent criticisms of each other are both correct. But their own central values are also both correct. We need the right parts of both, without the wrong parts.
That combination, supposedly, is yellow:
Big picture, open systems, networks, global flows
Flexible, simultaneous consideration of multiple perspectives
Tolerance for chaos, change, and uncertainty
Integration of ranking (hierarchy) and linking (community)
Caring combined with freedom
Voluntary, spontaneous cooperation rather than either win/lose competition or compulsory consensus processing
Capacity to act in both orange and green modes as appropriate
If this sounds less specific than the other two, it might be because “yellow” is a work in progress. I do think it’s pointing in the right direction, toward what I call participation*. That is the way to avoid the false alternatives of monism and dualism.
I think that you are right that civilisation has changed our relationship to work, making it about efficiency rather than enjoying process itself. It reminds me of how Jean Liedloff recounts her experience with the Yequana in "The Continuum Concept":
> One was the apparent absence of a word for "work" in the Yequana vocabulary. [...] There were words for each activity that might have been included, but no generic term.
> If they did not distinguish work from other ways of spending time, it was little wonder that they behaved so irrationally (as I then judged) about fetching water. The women left their firesides several times a day, carrying two or three small gourds at a time, walked part of the way down the mountain, picked their way down a precipitous slope that was extremely slippery when wet, filled the gourds in a streamlet, and climbed back to the village above. The whole operation took about twenty minutes. Many of them carried babies as well as gourds.
> [...]
> Upon reflection, I was hard put to think of a "better" way to use the water-fetching time, at least from the point of view of well-being. If progress, on the other hand, were the criterion, or its handmaidens, speed, efficiency, and novelty, the water walks were positively moronic. But my experience of the ingenuity of the people in question was such that I had no doubt that, had I asked them to invent a means of precluding my going to the stream for water, they would have put together some bamboo pipes, or a pulley to help me deal with the slippery bit, or built me a hut near the stream. They themselves had no motive to progress, as they felt no need, no pressure from any quarter, to change their ways.
I was very impressed by parts of that book (you mentioned it once previously and I read it, at least parts of it). Actually, in one draft for this post I included a sequence from The Continuum Concept. Ultimately it ended up in my big trash can. But I can pick it up. Here it is:
"One of the sharpest anthropological observations I know was not made by a professional anthropologist, but by an adventuress-turned-baby-care-influencer called Jean Liedloff. In the mid 20th century, at the age of 20, Jean traveled to the Amazon rainforest with two diamond miners from Italy. There she was introduced to the horticulturalist Ye'kuana people.
The miners habitually traveled in a dug-out boat together with a number of Ye'kuana men. When they came to stony waterfalls, the crew had to push the boat on logs over the boulders. The work was both hard and hazardous. All the crew members slipped and injured their lower legs. The boat regularly tipped over, pinning one or another of the crew members under it. Jean and the Italians spent several days in advance dreading the hard work.
“We had done the portage before with the small canoe, and the two Italians and I, knowing what lay ahead, spent several days dreading the hard work and pain. On the day we arrived at Arepuchi Falls we were primed to suffer and started off, grim-faced and hating every moment, to drag the thing over the rocks.“
The task was just as difficult as anticipated. Already a quarter through the way everyone's ankles were bleeding. Jean decided to take a photo of the scene, partly just to escape it for a minute.
“From my vantage point and momentary disinvolvement, I noticed a most interesting fact. Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything and swearing non-stop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest, Indians, were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle; they relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and were especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held bare-backed against the scorching granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest, enjoying his relief.”
"... much of the unreal quality of its people was accounted for by an absence of unhappiness, a large factor in every society familiar to me."
This "absence of unhappiness" was the most salient point of her book. If you are truly happy, then there is no reason to change things or be more efficient.
For this I am convinced that happiness is the greatest threat to progress, and therefore our current civilization does its outmost to stomp it out whenever it emerges (not in a conscious way of course, but even the thought of being so satisfied that you don't want anything more seems like heresy).
>>even the thought of being so satisfied that you don't want anything more seems like heresy
Just listen to John Stuart Mill:
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”
This sounds totally right. Though there seem to be different kinds of work that do it for different people. One would think that crocheting and knitting are as good as dishwashing or paving a road, but I can only get unpleasantly nervous trying to knit something big. I would rather pave a few meters of cobble stone pathway.
Yes, definitely. For example, Anders and I differ on that point. I tend to prefer coarser work that requires more energy and less deliberation. Especially I detest work that forces me to keep many numbers in my head, like woodworking or insulation with boards. Anders is more for logistics and measurements and has nothing against those jobs.
And I'm entirely open for the possibility that some people enjoy no manual work at all.
I occasionally enjoy manual work (mowing, weeding, building), but mostly I enjoy work of the mind (analysis, engineering, programming, problem solving). While this serves capitalist interests, I'm very good at focusing on the work at hand (and bad at focusing on deadlines, and multi taking). I'm not sure, but it feels to me like what people suggest when they talk about being in a state of flow, or of being focused on a task, or emphasizing craft above a narrow definition of productivity.
Whatever, it usually brings me joy, or at least satisfaction, in the process, and in a job well done. And hopefully in achieving some new insight into the apparent nature of things based on empirical data.
I've observed that other people seem to gain a state similar to your experience of physical work through intentional exercise.
Maybe it's from belief in God and salvation, and enjoyment of work, and of thought, but I never felt the desire to go into my own mind for its own sake to find peace or calm or insight.
Buddhism was/is an elite religion of the ruling classes in a slave empire, but that said, Sam Harris is a very bad source.
As Buber stated, western religion is based on the archetype of I-Thou, parent-child. Write a similar article about western religion and prayer to compare.
Eastern religion is more about “it”. Thus, the goal is detachment from illusions and emotional clinging.
You might find this to be more interesting, but he usually goes deep into the weeds.
The main advantage with Sam Harris is that he wrote a (quite readable) book, which is a good medium for beginners. Jumping into a blog in an unknown subject would have been much more difficult.
Hyper rationalists "invited into the Abyss"? Secular tribalists?
Never read Harris, so I'll take you word that his book is readable. There are advantages and disadvantages to a secular atheist with medical training writing a book on consciousness raising, but I don't think he really understands the "spiritual" aspect of the topic, by definition.
Bias disclosure: I've been in Christian, Muslim (12er Shi'ism) and Buddhist communities, and generally accept the need for something archetypal (Joseph Campbell-ish) beyond "woke" postmodern relativism/pluralism to better explain how spirituality and religion evolved culturally (as survival adaptations).
This is one of the best examples of how Harris is actually "religious" in the sense that he is emotionally invested in a tribalistic value system that is based on vicious, reactionary emotions that undermine his objectivity.
Eric Weinstein says that Harris "is being invited into the Abyss".
Hyper rationalism by itself is, or can be in Harris' case, a dead end. It doesn't guarantee an escape from human depravity and evil (the felt need for communion, meaning and purpose and some institutionalization of such need) any more than religion does.
Thank you for another brilliant article. I deeply get the satisfaction that rote manual labor can bestow on us. The more we urbanize, the less we have such outings at hand. We are essentially divorced from the circumstances in which we developed into humans.
One thing kept coming into my mind the longer you wrote about the sameness of manual labor and meditation: The core difference between the two is that meditation is a self-serving action with no output, whereas manual labor always produces a tangible result - hopefully more towards the order we strive for.
>>The core difference between the two is that meditation is a self-serving action with no output, whereas manual labor always produces a tangible result - hopefully more towards the order we strive for.
Yes. Sadly, people who are not feeling great while working usually work even more efficiently. The only task where industry clearly can't compete is childcare. So I think a bonus for having a baby is the opportunity to feel efficient regardless of how I'm working: Whatever I do while watching a baby is an objective net plus!
Tove, thank you for the shout-out!
There's a book from the 1980s, "Chop Wood Carry Water" by Rick fields (1984) which delves into this subject too.
Beware, there is a second book by another author with the same title. It's easy to get them confused. It addresses some other subject.
I have spent the last two years spending most of my weekends landscaping, which involves hours spent trudging up and down a hill carrying buckets of rocks and mud, and digging holes. My husband cannot understand how I will do this for hours without air pods or a podcast. I have to think hard and focus all day for my job, and doing this completely mindless but physically difficult work has been completely addicting for me. I actually can't wait to get out there on the weekends and move dirt and rocks and plant things. I am positive it has saved my mental health. In winter when the ground is frozen and I can't do as much, my migraines come back. The more exhausted and blistered and sunburnt I get the rest of the year, the more they start to disappear. It's been a revelation. Bravo 👏
Congratulations!
I also get headaches if I don't go out. The limit tends to be at noon. If I haven't been outdoors by that time I tend to get a dizzy feeling that doesn't go away until next morning. Until last year I believed it was something with the lack of light indoors or maybe poor air quality. Then I spent almost two months indoors because I had to finish plastering and painting works before New Year and I didn't get any headaches. For that reason I tend to believe that lack of exercise and too much near-seeing could be the most important reasons.
I believe that all human zoos should allow daytime outdoor exercise.
Most comments here seem to be from people much more knowledgable than I, but I have been reading and listening a lot to books on Buddhism and it seems to me your article misses the point.
The point of meditation is not to "not think". It is to train the mind to think "better".
The part that is mistakenly called "not thinking" is to train the mind to be very focused on a single thing (usually the breath) and not to be distracted by every passing thought.
Mindfulness (another widely and wrongly used term) is then used to "see" things that we usually ignore, thus gaining better understanding of our experience in this world.
I am very much a novice, but I was already blown away (and my life changed a little to the better) by some truths that I worked very hard to not notice during my lifetime and suddenly did notice and accepted using these practices.
One such example is the distinction between physical pain and suffering. I think this is reflected in the story about the canoe.
Just because you are in pain doesn't mean something is wrong and needs fixing. This is something quite simple that I have not noticed for many decades, and I see most people around me still equate "pain" (or discomfort, or annoyance) with a moral "badness".
>>Just because you are in pain doesn't mean something is wrong and needs fixing. This is something quite simple that I have not noticed for many decades, and I see most people around me still equate "pain" (or discomfort, or annoyance) with a moral "badness".
That is a great insight. But personally I'm feeling a bit annoyed by the idea that suffering is voluntary, for one reason: Childbirth. Since the 1950s pregnant women have been taught that they can choose to see labor pains in a different light than other kinds of pain and not suffer from them for real. And I'm sure some people can actually do that. But for most people it is only possible to decouple lighter pain from suffering. Not very heavy pain like labor pains (labor pains are very different for different people but... I think you get my point). So although I actually like the idea that pain can be decoupled from suffering, I also think it has been misused a lot.
It's not that pain can be detached from suffering (also that would be great) it's that suffering is not in itself "bad" and needs to be rectified at all costs.
Childbirth is actually a great example of that - it hurts a lot (so I'm told), but it's _supposed_ to hurt, so actually if you're hurting then everything is going according to plan.
>>so actually if you're hurting then everything is going according to plan.
To some extent, yes. The problem is the ideal that women in labor should comport themselves with the calmness and dignity of a Buddhist monk because the pain is "positive pain" or some other bullshit. Above a certain level of intensity, it becomes very difficult to perceive pain more than one way. I'm sure some people can, but to ask something like that from the vast majority of people is just cruel.
To expect everyone to be enlightened is dumb. To expect women to deal with one of the most painful things humans experience with equanimity and total inner peace because maybe a few women claim that they are able to is really annoying.
But to say that it's something people can work *towards* is totally awesome and cool. Not sure if that bothers you or why it would.
Also: meditation emphasizes increased awareness on a much finer level than you get from doing work.
Altho of course physical work can be a very meditative state qualitatively, and criticism of upper class people going to fancy resorts to meditate when they never do manual labor is super fair, the kind of meditative state you get from working just doesn't have the same potential for profound growth.
I grew up on a farm working outdoors with my body all the time, and I have done a ten day meditation course through dhamma.org, if that matters.
>>But to say that it's something people can work *towards* is totally awesome and cool. Not sure if that bothers you or why it would.
No, really, "can" is one thing, "should" is another. I only have a problem with "should".
I've both meditated and carried out repetitive physical work for years. I'll confirm your sense that the mental state one achieves chopping wood and carrying water ( https://wildsimplejoy.com/enlightenment-chop-wood-carry-water-meaning/ ) is indeed a light version of basic meditation, though it feels better because of the way it engages the muscles and engenders a feeling of accomplishment. However, at least in my experience, it's really nothing compared to the first jhana, which feels like sunbeams infusing one's entire being.
How about the second and third and fourth jhana? Does it get boring after a while?
It's somewhat challenging for me to reach the first jhana, and conditions haven't been favorable enough to support meditation in several months. But when I did achieve it, the first jhana felt satisfying in the sense that I didn't just want to keep meditating perpetually. It doesn't get boring; it's like exercise in the sense that once you're done, you feel like that's enough and you don't want to continue.
I've read meditators describe a sense of dissatisfaction that remains throughout their practice, no matter how deep they go, that can only be extinguished by enlightenment. I have a suspicion that they're just dissatisfied complainers. I've never been past the first jhana, but in that state I felt emotionally and physically suffused with joy, and I wasn't aware of anything like dissatisfaction - my sense is that you can't be aware of anything else, because to reach the first jhana I have to turn my complete and total focus on a slight sensation of pleasure, which doesn't leave much room for anything else.
Overall, I'd say that if you haven't meditated, there is an experience that you don't quite understand, in just the same way that it's hard to know what, say, marijuana is like without having tried it. The lower level of meditation is *like* losing oneself in work, but even this lighter state is more peaceful and more relaxing, and there's actually a kind of hyper-alertness to internal states. Caffeine facilitates hard work, but I could never meditate on caffeine.
Maybe the biggest difference between meditation and repetitive physical labor is that work generates a more alexithymic state, because of the focus on tangible things like snow to be shoveled, screws to be driven, or wood to be cut. Discomfort fades away, but judgment and questioning remains. With meditation there's a hyperawareness of almost everything; judgment and questioning are the only things that are suspended.
Reading what you write, I get the impression that meditation is a way to practice non-complaining.
As we all know, working is also a way to practice non-complaining, but as you say, it is incomplete: People who like to complain can work and complain at the same time. Perceiving-without-complaining is not the main focus of work, just a side effect.
So I wonder if maybe meditation could be a way establish a habit to stop judging things all the time? In that case I guess it should benefit people who have too many opinions to enjoy life (which is what Sam Harris described and I didn't understand).
> So I wonder if maybe meditation could be a way establish a habit to stop judging things all the time? In that case I guess it should benefit people who have too many opinions to enjoy life (which is what Sam Harris described and I didn't understand).
Sort of, yes. Meditation is a good way for people who are stressed, or innately miserable, to pacify themselves and minimize the intellectual triggers that cause negative emotions. Frequent meditation under externally stressful conditions has occasionally led me to experience depersonalized states where I begin watching myself take routine actions as a passenger in my own body, or a spectator in a movie. Other people feel stressed almost all the time because of thoughts that arise internally - thoughts about possible dangers, embarrassing memories, self-criticism, and so on. Meditation can help with this by quieting the thoughts that lead to emotional reactions.
You seem like the sort of person who wouldn't really derive much benefit from meditation, but you might know someone who would. The trick, of course, would be getting such a person to take their medicine!
>>Other people feel stressed almost all the time because of thoughts that arise internally - thoughts about possible dangers, embarrassing memories, self-criticism, and so on
I guessed there were such people behind the lines of Sam Harris' book. Why would thoughts be considered bad, if some people didn't have very bad thoughts all the time?
>>You seem like the sort of person who wouldn't really derive much benefit from meditation, but you might know someone who would.
I can guess who you mean. And he thinks it is stupid to be too happy.
> Why would thoughts be considered bad, if some people didn't have very bad thoughts all the time?
It's the emotions that overwhelm some people as a result of their thoughts that are the real problem, I think. Meditation doesn't only still thoughts, it also calms a person emotionally.
> I can guess who you mean. And he thinks it is stupid to be too happy.
Anders? He actually didn't cross my mind!
But you can tell him that at least in terms of productivity, most people are suboptimally happy; here's a study that found making people happy improves productivity 12%, and people suffering from bereavement are less productive: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/35451/1/522164196.pdf
Can you describe what you do when you are engaged in a jhana practice? You alluded to it a bit when you mentioned bringing "complete and total focus on a slight sensation of pleasure," but I'm curious, what is the character of the focus that you reference? Would you characterize it as intellectual, emotional, physical or something else entirely?
Roughly, it's an intellectual focus that causes an emotional or physical sensation.
More accurately, I'd describe the first Jhana as a perceptual focus that causes a perceived sensation. In order to achieve it, it usually takes me ~30 minutes of meditation quieting my thoughts, relaxing my limbs, and focusing my attention on myself and the area around me. Only after my attention becomes sufficiently focused and my internal distractions quiet am I able to sigh, smile, and search around for a positive feeling somewhere. Usually I can find some hint of pleasure either in the low emotional rumble of my feelings, in the muscles of my smiling face, or in my hands, arms, or feet. When I "look" at that sensation and maintain a quiet, sustained attention on it, the sensation either slips away, or begins to grow and expand until it's so overwhelming that I drop it, or else, if I can maintain focus on it, it expands into euphoria that washes over me in waves.
Lots of people have written about this; for example: https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/26525/how-to-complete-the-first-jhana While a lot of them are Buddhists who follow specific teachings described with a rich vocabulary, I can tell you don't have to do it that way. Just spend what feels like a long time relaxing, calming your thoughts, and building the ability to sustain your attention; then focus your attention on pleasure until the sensation engulfs you.
I think scrolling on social media is an attempt to meditate, with the disadvantage that you don't get anything out of it versus building something over time with work.
Your post reminds me of the novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
I haven't actually read the book, but I feel like meditative flow states while concentrating on important work must be in there somewhere.
I wouldn't recommend it. Though I don't have the heart to tell fans of the work I didn't like it, you'll soon see why if you read https://quillette.com/2024/02/20/motorpsycho-nightmare/
I read the first parts of that book very recently. I can't say I didn't like it. Especially the anthropologist in me liked Robert Pirsig's observations of people around him and their way of reasoning. But it is a very long book (or it felt that way) so I only read the first part. Also because I felt a bit emotionally disturbed by reading about the boy who would later become a victim of murder.
However, my mother says that when that book was new, when she was 19 years old, she read it and it changed her world view. She says that by then, the technical mindset that Robert Pirsig advocated was something new. By then, complaining as a lifestyle was seen as completely normal and Robert Pirsig described an alternative to that, she says.
I read the book in the mid to late '70s. Maybe when I too was about 19. I was impressed and thought it quite wise while still being a well written yarn, though I felt somewhat sorry for the guy he was travelling with. Beyond that I can't summon any substantive memories of its content. Being in to hitchhiking I also read Kerouac's 'On the the Road' about which left similarly fuzzy memories.
It is the 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' radio series that I recall vividly from that time (in 1980 it played over the NZ TV test pattern after the 1pm (radio) news bulletin. Its wry observations about humanity were revelatory (and very funny).
As an aside, one of my Grandfathers meditated daily. He started either in Mesopotamia during WWI or in India shortly after. I think as a way to reduce his propensity to 'worry'.
>>I felt somewhat sorry for the guy he was travelling with
I thought about that too: Did "John" go on any more trips with Robert after that book?
I don't know. Pirsig wrote a follow-up book that I believe I read, though can't recall it. I expect he didn't really have anything more to say.
Thank you for taking up the reading and writing this review. I really enjoyed it.
"My guess is that the “I” Sam Harris is talking about is not that anonymous doer, but an entity that takes form in the friction with the “you” and “he” and “she” and “them”."
I think he is talking about both, and while I imagine many people would like to lubricate away the friction referenced in the latter, I agree that few set out to rid themselves of the former; however, I took Harris (among others) as suggesting that seeing through the one reveals the illusory aspect of the other. I don't think the project is oriented toward establishing or even encountering any particular state (though some unusual ones seem likely to emerge); instead, it seems oriented toward a transformation in the mode of perception (i.e. epiphany).
Did you ever believe in Santa Claus growing up? I did. I ardently believed in Santa Claus and persisted in the belief to an age that I think became uncomfortable for my parents. I still remember when my mom sat me down on the couch and told me the truth. It rocked my world--far more profoundly than I think she ever could have anticipated. In one fell swoop, the world was disenchanted and magic became make believe. It laid the groundwork for my eventual turn toward atheism: an outcome that deeply wounded both my parents. And yet, I still love Santa. I love Christmas and have perpetuated the myth for all of my children--something I absolutely could not have done if I still believed in him in the way I did as a child.
My suspicion is that Harris and other practitioners of particular forms of meditation are suggesting that a similar epiphany is available vis a vis the ego. I don't believe in Santa, and in so not believing in him, I am far more effective at keeping him alive. I continue to believe in the ego as I once believed in Santa and I wonder if perhaps that belief is what saps the vitality from the living.
Thank you for starting it all through urging me to take a look at meditation.
>>Did you ever believe in Santa Claus growing up?
I don't remember much of it myself, but my mother has an anecdote about it: She always told me that Santa Claus didn't exist, because she was a rational atheist. Then, when I was a few years old, we were at the "open pre-school" and who came in through the door if not Santa Claus himself? I got scared and hid and afterwards I was very upset and accused my mother of having lied to me. "You fooled me, you said that Santa didn't exist and I saw him", my mother reports that I said to her. She, always the good empiricist, felt the need to apologize and say that she just didn't know that he existed. The only thing I remember myself of all this is the scary big Santa Claus figure. Later, I must have understood that empiricism is a bit more complicated than that and thereby finished believing in Santa Claus again. But it probably was a painless process because I don't remember it.
>>I don't believe in Santa, and in so not believing in him, I am far more effective at keeping him alive. I continue to believe in the ego as I once believed in Santa and I wonder if perhaps that belief is what saps the vitality from the living.
Very interesting. So what we are talking about is, essentially, self-distance, if we translate it into everyday language? Then I think I get it, because taking one's own perspective too seriously without constantly relativizing it really saps the vitality from life.
This misses the soteriological aspects of many meditational traditions. But still makes a nice doughnut around the hole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soteriology
Compare Devotee-ism (like many protestant Christianities). This is a different example of soteriological frameworks for self/help or religion-as-a-psyche-salve (and not a government department for thought control and obedience like Catholic & Orthodox Christianities).
(apologies for length)
From what I can tell, the renunciate/salvation religions (Karen Armstrong and Karl Jaspers called them Axial religions) were an evolutionary adaptation to the chaotic, violent social conditions (increased tribal wars) that evolved as a result of the Bronze Age collapse. New technologies such as metals, wagons, chariots and agriculture disrupted pre-monotheistic, "pagan" and tribal social forms, creating the need for a better "sense making" system.
Axial religion probably emerged in agrarian city-states as a response to both war and to the need to control peasant and slave populations to ensure social order and strong defenses against marauding pagans and attacks by other city-states, or empires and dynasties.
As paleo-libertarian historian Leonard Liggio explained*, before 1492, Catholicism's function was supra-national (and "classically liberal" in places) in the context of decentralized politics, before the centralized empire was re-established (first by Spain) and the modern nation state system emerged.
After 1492, the messy, decentralized forms of medieval/feudal "classical liberalism" (cortes, fueros, communas, rule of law replacing fealty oaths) were swept aside by Isabella's "modern" reforms meant to strengthen national unity via linguistic conformism and standardization (and Absolutism, aka "oriental despotism").
Recentralization of imperial power and colonialism led to the destruction of classically liberal ideas (especially "liberty") and quasi-democratic practices (and decentralized power) that emerged before 1492. Other historians have pointed out a similar process in the German Free Cities and the Hanseatic League in which classical liberalism flourished under decentralized politics.
Joseph Henrich explained classical liberalism's origins in his W.E.I.R.D. model: the Church's abolition of cousin marriage, the establishment of the nuclear family and Manorialism and technological advances and increased literacy, and the expansion of river and sea trade and the urban commoner classes led to the development of high-social-trust institutions, such as formal courts of law, insurance, parliaments, and so forth.
The idea that religion was an impediment to progress is relatively recent historically, a product of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and Marxism.
One libertarian historian even claims that the revival of pagan resistance to state power was behind the Enlightenment. (but of course pagans had their own religions.)
The Cathars and Troubadours of Languedoc and vicinity are presumably a similar influence.
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* https://phillysoc.org/liggio-the-hispanic-tradition-of-liberty/
excerpt:
[Augustin] Thierry’s historical contributions show how rights emerged in the great religious movements of the Peace of God and the Gregorian Reformation, and were consolidated in the oath-bound associations creating town-charters and representative institutions. In the debris of the Carolingian Empire and its tradeless feudal system, there arose commerce, industry, with watermills and windmills and private property in land. The feudal institutions were challenged by the oath-bound associations, usually led by abbots or bishops. Contract and consent became the center of the struggle against the feudal institutions of autarkic economy. In the conflict against feudalism, the emerging market forces of commerce and agriculture created the edifice of medieval legal and constitutional institutions.
...
I cover the origins of obedience as a virtue for Catholic & Orthodox Christianities with related posts listed at https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/posts-on-fideism-churches-and-religions.html
See also https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/inappropriation which is an aside, on reading Jörg Rüpke’s _On Roman Religion: Lived Religion and the Individual in Ancient Rome_ which outlines how Christianity's focus on individualism (to be very rough about it) was realigned with an imperial cult of obedience to those anointed (as ruler and pontiff) to out-maneuver more local identities like cities and their mores, and city or ethnic based gods (the Jewish rejection of the Emperor as god is part of this history). Orthodox Christianity is basically a government department, Catholicism is an orthodox church gone rogue (set up as it was by expelled extremists from Constantinople). For modern day examples of Orthodoxy, obedience and an imperial method, just look at Putin's Moscovite empire and it's use of Russian orthodoxy in removing individual agency that is not aligned with the state (among other methods).
It is interesting that the success of the Roman state in eventually imposing the Imperial cult is sometimes blamed for the dissolution of said empire. Maybe letting individuals do their own research is why Orthodox/Catholic regard fideism as a heresy as it undermines obedience. Making Christianity an imperial church removed it devotee-ist origins. The protestant return to devotee-ist forms (Jesus is Lord!)(Except for High Anglicanism which is an English Orthodxy) should not be overlooked.
Personally I think the institutionalization of narcissism and psychopathy we witness in any imperial cult (one leader, one faith, one god, one folk, one one oneness one) will always led to the death cult end we see in Guyana or in Russia today.
Interesting, thanks! Do you think the vicious attacks on the “gnostics” that wrote the Nag Hammadi texts expose the power plays that went on as the church was being established?
well, might be too early as texts per se, but were possibly hidden in that period of the imperial phase of take-over or taking-on of Christianity, hidden in response to the creation of top-down orthodoxy, (I am no scholar of ancient texts) but I do think they were mostly pre- or at least not- Pauline aligned texts, in any case.
Early on when Christianity was not very distinct from Jewish forms, the Jewish religion was thought to be the fastest growing religion in the Eastern Mediterranean, so it was an expanding Jewish but Greek speaking population/market which provided a substrate or community for Pauline Christianity to move out over, and be understood by, which becomes the form that Constantine chooses, as imperial cult in 313 AD, then St Augustine develops the framework for the church version of Christianity as a City of God (no middleware of city or ethnicity cults/communities between believers/obeyers and the Emperor) which is established as the only allowed religion when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. One emporer, one faith, one god. Beckwith reckons this invention, or suite of one-ness is a Scythian invention that played out across Eurasia in the axial age bracket,
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/christopher-i-beckwiths-the-scythian
it should be noted that some argue that the top down selection of orthodoxy did not really suppress Christian theological disputations, some say it was so interminable the next one thing (Islam) was accepted to shut them all up, but this did not last long either.
I suspect the lives of the older upper classes were similar enough to modern white collar work that meditation was necessary for them. Capitalism has just expanded the scope of people it’s good for!
Some mental ramblings.....
The "woke" "left" , which is primarily the "professional-managerial class" (PMC, Ehrenreich) tends to form into a quasi-religious, elite priestly cult (above the traditional industrial class and above the traditional white collar class), as Joel Kotkin calls it, the New Clerisy, that dictates values, tastes, morals, etc.
Classical meditation is usually associated with introspection and radical self-skepticism, if not rejection of ego and attachments to bad (ungodly) emotions and ideas. "Woke" is the opposite of that, it is a cult of bad emotions and ideas: the Dark Triad (sociopathy, narcissism, hunger for power).
But it is correct that the material and class base of any group's ideology largely determines its nature, ideas and values and how it justifies its use of power.
Historical "leftism", including Marxism was "conservative" in the sense that it saw, just as the Ancine Regime did, classic liberalism as a middle class, bourgeois revolution by the expanding medieval middle class (river and sea traders) that were literate, but not refined.
The "woke" elites (the PMC) now has continued that elite stance and the recycling of old, anti-liberal, anti-middle class, anti-property owning ideas and values of a faux priest class.
Anyways, as Nietzsche said, what followed the "death of God" is likely to be worse than what went before it, even more psychic damage. My guess is that Harris looked at meditation as a potential medical treatment for the spiritual and psychological problems left in the wake of the death of God. (I define "spiritual" as the traditional path to fulfilling the ancient human need for communion*, social cooperation, shared learning, meaning and purpose.)
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* Peter Richerson, PhD ecology, UC Davis, quotes Darwin (as an example of group selection hypothesis and the neurobiology of sympathy in "primeval times"):
"It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection (178-179)."
Charles Darwin himself believed in human group selection! I had no idea. But why wouldn't he? He was very good at thinking and the idea is logically obvious.
There have been a series of controversies for decades in sociobiology and evolutionary theory in which the “left” advances fake science such as the “blank slate”, and then real scientists debunk the junk science. The good science falls under the general category of gene-culture coevolution, also known as “dual inheritance” theory.
There are levels to consciousness and awareness. People can achieve these deeper states in all sorts of ways (eg. sitting still, during times of intense trauma/suffering, praying, etc).
Meditation is one of many paths that offer a direct experience, and not be force-fed a mental concept, of this truth: "I am" (an awareness/observer beyond the mental voice, emotions, pain, physical body, or any other "input").
While the type of work you describe is obviously "more zen" than being stressed at the same tasks, you can go deeper/further and let go of mental/physical blockages by observing your mind instead of giving it work.
>>While the type of work you describe is obviously "more zen" than being stressed at the same tasks, you can go deeper/further and let go of mental/physical blockages by observing your mind instead of giving it work.
Yes. Working is rather basic. If people can't reach the most advanced mental experiences through working that is quite natural, since getting the job done is a limiting factor in itself.
That is a crucial insight. Meta-cognition is one of the advantages potentially conferred by such practices and traditions.
Your meditative work state sounds a lot like what is described as "flow". (About "flow", there is a lot of pompous stuff written.)
> Not in the modern sense, through negotiating all day long with people in an office
It's possible that with a lot of the modern "professional class" there's very little flow-state work, with anything repetitive enough that one could do it systematically and efficiently without constant analysis either automated our outsourced to less-well-paid people.
Yep. Flow is basically Robert Kegan's stage 5 developmental level, which this AI scientist (and Buddhist) defines this way:
https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence
note: "orange" is a modern rationalism is Clare Graves "Spiral Dynamics" scheme, and "green" is postmodern relativism/pluralism.
excerpt:
The thing is, orange [modern rationalism] and green [postmodernism] are both right.
They are also both wrong. Their virulent criticisms of each other are both correct. But their own central values are also both correct. We need the right parts of both, without the wrong parts.
That combination, supposedly, is yellow:
Big picture, open systems, networks, global flows
Flexible, simultaneous consideration of multiple perspectives
Tolerance for chaos, change, and uncertainty
Integration of ranking (hierarchy) and linking (community)
Caring combined with freedom
Voluntary, spontaneous cooperation rather than either win/lose competition or compulsory consensus processing
Capacity to act in both orange and green modes as appropriate
If this sounds less specific than the other two, it might be because “yellow” is a work in progress. I do think it’s pointing in the right direction, toward what I call participation*. That is the way to avoid the false alternatives of monism and dualism.
...
* https://meaningness.com/participation
I think that you are right that civilisation has changed our relationship to work, making it about efficiency rather than enjoying process itself. It reminds me of how Jean Liedloff recounts her experience with the Yequana in "The Continuum Concept":
> One was the apparent absence of a word for "work" in the Yequana vocabulary. [...] There were words for each activity that might have been included, but no generic term.
> If they did not distinguish work from other ways of spending time, it was little wonder that they behaved so irrationally (as I then judged) about fetching water. The women left their firesides several times a day, carrying two or three small gourds at a time, walked part of the way down the mountain, picked their way down a precipitous slope that was extremely slippery when wet, filled the gourds in a streamlet, and climbed back to the village above. The whole operation took about twenty minutes. Many of them carried babies as well as gourds.
> [...]
> Upon reflection, I was hard put to think of a "better" way to use the water-fetching time, at least from the point of view of well-being. If progress, on the other hand, were the criterion, or its handmaidens, speed, efficiency, and novelty, the water walks were positively moronic. But my experience of the ingenuity of the people in question was such that I had no doubt that, had I asked them to invent a means of precluding my going to the stream for water, they would have put together some bamboo pipes, or a pulley to help me deal with the slippery bit, or built me a hut near the stream. They themselves had no motive to progress, as they felt no need, no pressure from any quarter, to change their ways.
I was very impressed by parts of that book (you mentioned it once previously and I read it, at least parts of it). Actually, in one draft for this post I included a sequence from The Continuum Concept. Ultimately it ended up in my big trash can. But I can pick it up. Here it is:
"One of the sharpest anthropological observations I know was not made by a professional anthropologist, but by an adventuress-turned-baby-care-influencer called Jean Liedloff. In the mid 20th century, at the age of 20, Jean traveled to the Amazon rainforest with two diamond miners from Italy. There she was introduced to the horticulturalist Ye'kuana people.
The miners habitually traveled in a dug-out boat together with a number of Ye'kuana men. When they came to stony waterfalls, the crew had to push the boat on logs over the boulders. The work was both hard and hazardous. All the crew members slipped and injured their lower legs. The boat regularly tipped over, pinning one or another of the crew members under it. Jean and the Italians spent several days in advance dreading the hard work.
“We had done the portage before with the small canoe, and the two Italians and I, knowing what lay ahead, spent several days dreading the hard work and pain. On the day we arrived at Arepuchi Falls we were primed to suffer and started off, grim-faced and hating every moment, to drag the thing over the rocks.“
The task was just as difficult as anticipated. Already a quarter through the way everyone's ankles were bleeding. Jean decided to take a photo of the scene, partly just to escape it for a minute.
“From my vantage point and momentary disinvolvement, I noticed a most interesting fact. Here before me were several men engaged in a single task. Two, the Italians, were tense, frowning, losing their tempers at everything and swearing non-stop in the distinctive manner of the Tuscan. The rest, Indians, were having a fine time. They were laughing at the unwieldiness of the canoe, making a game of the battle; they relaxed between pushes, laughing at their own scrapes and were especially amused when the canoe, as it wobbled forward, pinned one, then another, underneath it. The fellow held bare-backed against the scorching granite, when he could breathe again, invariably laughed the loudest, enjoying his relief.”
"... much of the unreal quality of its people was accounted for by an absence of unhappiness, a large factor in every society familiar to me."
This "absence of unhappiness" was the most salient point of her book. If you are truly happy, then there is no reason to change things or be more efficient.
For this I am convinced that happiness is the greatest threat to progress, and therefore our current civilization does its outmost to stomp it out whenever it emerges (not in a conscious way of course, but even the thought of being so satisfied that you don't want anything more seems like heresy).
>>even the thought of being so satisfied that you don't want anything more seems like heresy
Just listen to John Stuart Mill:
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”
This sounds totally right. Though there seem to be different kinds of work that do it for different people. One would think that crocheting and knitting are as good as dishwashing or paving a road, but I can only get unpleasantly nervous trying to knit something big. I would rather pave a few meters of cobble stone pathway.
Yes, definitely. For example, Anders and I differ on that point. I tend to prefer coarser work that requires more energy and less deliberation. Especially I detest work that forces me to keep many numbers in my head, like woodworking or insulation with boards. Anders is more for logistics and measurements and has nothing against those jobs.
And I'm entirely open for the possibility that some people enjoy no manual work at all.
I occasionally enjoy manual work (mowing, weeding, building), but mostly I enjoy work of the mind (analysis, engineering, programming, problem solving). While this serves capitalist interests, I'm very good at focusing on the work at hand (and bad at focusing on deadlines, and multi taking). I'm not sure, but it feels to me like what people suggest when they talk about being in a state of flow, or of being focused on a task, or emphasizing craft above a narrow definition of productivity.
Whatever, it usually brings me joy, or at least satisfaction, in the process, and in a job well done. And hopefully in achieving some new insight into the apparent nature of things based on empirical data.
I've observed that other people seem to gain a state similar to your experience of physical work through intentional exercise.
Maybe it's from belief in God and salvation, and enjoyment of work, and of thought, but I never felt the desire to go into my own mind for its own sake to find peace or calm or insight.
Buddhism was/is an elite religion of the ruling classes in a slave empire, but that said, Sam Harris is a very bad source.
As Buber stated, western religion is based on the archetype of I-Thou, parent-child. Write a similar article about western religion and prayer to compare.
Eastern religion is more about “it”. Thus, the goal is detachment from illusions and emotional clinging.
You might find this to be more interesting, but he usually goes deep into the weeds.
https://meaningness.substack.com/about
The main advantage with Sam Harris is that he wrote a (quite readable) book, which is a good medium for beginners. Jumping into a blog in an unknown subject would have been much more difficult.
Hyper rationalists "invited into the Abyss"? Secular tribalists?
Never read Harris, so I'll take you word that his book is readable. There are advantages and disadvantages to a secular atheist with medical training writing a book on consciousness raising, but I don't think he really understands the "spiritual" aspect of the topic, by definition.
Bias disclosure: I've been in Christian, Muslim (12er Shi'ism) and Buddhist communities, and generally accept the need for something archetypal (Joseph Campbell-ish) beyond "woke" postmodern relativism/pluralism to better explain how spirituality and religion evolved culturally (as survival adaptations).
This is one of the best examples of how Harris is actually "religious" in the sense that he is emotionally invested in a tribalistic value system that is based on vicious, reactionary emotions that undermine his objectivity.
Eric Weinstein says that Harris "is being invited into the Abyss".
Hyper rationalism by itself is, or can be in Harris' case, a dead end. It doesn't guarantee an escape from human depravity and evil (the felt need for communion, meaning and purpose and some institutionalization of such need) any more than religion does.
Oct 20, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkg3C8JDi_0
00:00 Intro
00:39 How Are We Supposed to Think About the Israel-Palestine Conflict?
08:19 The Mindset of Hamas
18:10 The Frightening Nature of Totalising Ideologies
29:24 Exploring the Mainstream Coverage
34:48 This is Much More Than Hatred
42:23 We Are at War with Jihadis
57:15 What Should Be Done in Response?
1:14:05 How Degraded is Israel?
1:19:10 The Spectrum of Anti-Semitism
1:31:10 Why Are Jews So Successful?
1:48:07 Are Eric & Sam Hopeful?
Thank you for another brilliant article. I deeply get the satisfaction that rote manual labor can bestow on us. The more we urbanize, the less we have such outings at hand. We are essentially divorced from the circumstances in which we developed into humans.
One thing kept coming into my mind the longer you wrote about the sameness of manual labor and meditation: The core difference between the two is that meditation is a self-serving action with no output, whereas manual labor always produces a tangible result - hopefully more towards the order we strive for.
>>The core difference between the two is that meditation is a self-serving action with no output, whereas manual labor always produces a tangible result - hopefully more towards the order we strive for.
Yes. Sadly, people who are not feeling great while working usually work even more efficiently. The only task where industry clearly can't compete is childcare. So I think a bonus for having a baby is the opportunity to feel efficient regardless of how I'm working: Whatever I do while watching a baby is an objective net plus!