Elliott Hulse on Meditation

[Aspiraling Wizard]

3 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What would you guys choose: a blank beta mind or an angry alpha mind?

Both would have their pros and cons. Both could end up either elevating themselves and spreading love or losing themselves in their emotions and ideologies and self-destructing. Whether or not one or the other would happen is relative to the SPECIFIC person in question and countless other factors.

[Aspiraling Wizard]

11 hours ago, nistake said:

I mean, come on...

You clearly underestimate and don't fully understand the dark side and dangers of consistent meditation.

 

[Aspiraling Wizard]

11 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Breaking News: Fox who guards hen house issues strong warning against leaving hen house unguarded

Breaking FOX News

[mandyjw]

Everything Christians warn against happening is meditation is right, in a way. The problem is the wanted/unwanted filter and the assumption that someone has the choice or power to want to avoid... something. As soon as you say "Don't look behind that door, or don't eat from the tree," it's already done. By no one. 

[Recursoinominado]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What would you guys choose: a blank beta mind or an angry alpha mind?

Blank meaning calmness and presence, absolutely!

[Aspiraling Wizard]

Careful, you're conflating the mind of a so called beta male with that of someone who's great at meditation/enlightened, e.t.c. There have been brainwave studies done on various types of men and what they seem to show is that at least on average, the "beta" males' thinking is very erratic and cluttered. The waveform meters actually show rapidly oscilating and spiking patterns, up down, up down and there are a lot of these peaks and valleys. This corresponds primarily with confusion, obsession and being stuck in your head. This is NOT a so called blank, clear, peaceful and enlightened mind. A lot of fear too probably and many of the fears probably aren't that legitimate in a state like this. This is contrasted with alpha and theta waves which are in general much smoother and have much more "swing." Which brings us to the truth however that these are STATES of consciousness that are being observed and measured. What the "Elliot Hulse/Red Pill" genre of guys fail to understand is that you aren't an alpha or beta or theta always and for life just because you are in a certain state right now or even that you are frequently and as a baseline in a certain one of these states. This is, among many other things a blindspot of having a materialistic "tint" to your glasses.

[Aspiraling Wizard]

@Recursoinominado

Careful, you're conflating the mind of a so called beta male with that of someone who's great at meditation/enlightened, e.t.c. There have been brainwave studies done on various types of men and what they seem to show is that at least on average, the "beta" males' thinking is very erratic and cluttered. The waveform meters actually show rapidly oscilating and spiking patterns, up down, up down and there are a lot of these peaks and valleys. This corresponds primarily with confusion, obsession and being stuck in your head. This is NOT a so called blank, clear, peaceful and enlightened mind. A lot of fear too probably and many of the fears probably aren't that legitimate in a state like this. This is contrasted with alpha and theta waves which are in general much smoother and have much more "swing." Which brings us to the truth however that these are STATES of consciousness that are being observed and measured. What the "Elliot Hulse/Red Pill" genre of guys fail to understand is that you aren't an alpha or beta or theta always and for life just because you are in a certain state right now or even that you are frequently and as a baseline in a certain one of these states. This is, among many other things a blindspot of having a materialistic "tint" to your glasses.

[Jacobsrw]

22 hours ago, benmitchell2812 said:

Elliott recently shed light on this about meditation (what are your guy's thoughts?) :

"It started when one of my successful friends winced at the mention of meditation.

 

He told me:

I can't do that stuff anymore, it makes your mind blank.

He told me he'd been meditating a lot. So much that his mind was completely blank. Like a desert. Tumbleweeds and all.

And obviously this has big implications for an entrepreneur, or any man on his hero's journey.

I didn't know at the time that my friend was referring to meditation sickness.

Yes, meditation can make you sick.

And no, it's not some woo-woo phenomenon. Most of the eastern religions have recognized meditation sickness as a normal occurrence.

Recently, I heard about one from a psychologist who “meditated so hard” she began tossing and turning in her sleep, became supremely anxious, had shortness of breath, and became overwhelmingly emotional.

In another more serious case, meditation apparently triggered a suicide."

Buddhists, Hindus, and other eastern religions have been aware of “meditation sickness” for hundreds of years.

The root cause of this strange ailment is a disconnection from the outside world and letting the mind go blank.

And that's the main reason why I no longer meditate - Letting the mind go blank alone is dangerous.

It’s like preparing the soil in the garden without planting anything.

Weeds will almost certainly infest your garden.

The same goes for the mind.

If you wipe it clean with meditation and leave it blank, you’re leaving your mind vulnerable to outside forces - demons, spirits, and negative beta thoughts.

You need to install new alpha software, add new files, and occupy that empty space with constructive thoughts to become a better man.

This is a a complete misunderstanding of meditation. When done with the right integration work, it is one of the most powerful tools available.

This is the sort of misconceptions that get spun by naive meditators who fail to see its purpose. Threatening suppressed baggage surfaces and they panic as if this is a bug in the system. Quite the contrary. The only reason one contracts following meditation, is because the underpinnings of their inner demons are being exposed. This provides the very opportunity to not only deal with them but also develop the capacity to deal with challenge much more competently in the future.

A entrepreneur or heavily pragmatic individual could only benefit from experiencing such “mind-blankness”. It allows space for awareness, clarity, reorganisation and creativity. One who relentlessly thinks, is doing no more good than a car driven on tyres that never get replaced. 
Using the mind till exhaustion can quickly become a disease.

Edited September 2, 2020 by Jacobsrw

[Recursoinominado]

@Aspiraling Wizard Blank mind = no thoughts = peace

Doesn't matter if you call him beta or alpha

[Leo Gura]

If you read the comments section under my video: The Dark Side Of Mediation, you'll see a lot of ignorant people, many of them Christians, taking my points as reasons why meditation is evil or demonic.

People have this naive notion that if meditation isn't easy, pleasant, and instantly positive, or if it creates emotional purging, then it must be evil. When in fact those negative symptoms are simply the process of the devil leaving your body. As always, the devil calls what is good, evil, and what is evil, good.

[Leo Gura]

If you're classifying people as alpha or beta, your mind certainly isn't blank

[Fran11]

16 hours ago, benmitchell2812 said:

It’s like preparing the soil in the garden without planting anything.

Weeds will almost certainly infest your garden.

If you wipe it clean with meditation and leave it blank, you’re leaving your mind vulnerable to outside forces - demons, spirits, and negative beta thoughts.

This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.

Learning to reject already existing thought habits makes it easier to filter new ones at will, not harder.

Yes, there can be negative temporary synthomps because of the ego revolting against your spiritual practice. But what he says is delusional.

Edited September 1, 2020 by Fran11

[Corpus]

1 hour ago, Aspiraling Wizard said:

Careful, you're conflating the mind of a so called beta male with that of someone who's great at meditation/enlightened, e.t.c. There have been brainwave studies done on various types of men and what they seem to show is that at least on average, the "beta" males' thinking is very erratic and cluttered. The waveform meters actually show rapidly oscilating and spiking patterns, up down, up down and there are a lot of these peaks and valleys. This corresponds primarily with confusion, obsession and being stuck in your head. This is NOT a so called blank, clear, peaceful and enlightened mind. A lot of fear too probably and many of the fears probably aren't that legitimate in a state like this. This is contrasted with alpha and theta waves which are in general much smoother and have much more "swing." Which brings us to the truth however that these are STATES of consciousness that are being observed and measured. What the "Elliot Hulse/Red Pill" genre of guys fail to understand is that you aren't an alpha or beta or theta always and for life just because you are in a certain state right now or even that you are frequently and as a baseline in a certain one of these states. This is, among many other things a blindspot of having a materialistic "tint" to your glasses.

The waveforms on an EEG do not measure consciousness or tell anything about the degree of cluttered thinking; the most "beta" guy could make his EEG show "alpha"  waves by sitting quietly with eye closed. Your conflation of neurophysiology and reproductive psychology is not accurate.

[mandyjw]

46 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

If you read the comments section under my video: The Dark Side Of Mediation, you'll see a lot of ignorant people, many of them Christians, taking my points as reasons why meditation is evil or demonic.

That's probably because search lead them to your video and they were expecting a Christian point of view. Christians think yoga is evil, my aunt even loaned us this DVD to try to save us which made me want to hurl. https://www.amazon.com/PraiseMoves-Christian-Alternative-Laurette-Willis/dp/0736915842 

I completely dismissed their fears during my rational atheist stage but also had absolutely no idea about the power of yoga and meditation or even just... whatever understanding or transformation was happening.  

Christians are 100% right because if you truly, truly believe and imagine that God is real and the Devil is real all your life but God must be accepted in and the Devil must be kept out, guess who you end up inviting in when you open doors you were told not to open? 

Ah, the power of imagination. 

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Aspiraling Wizard said:

Careful, you're conflating the mind of a so called beta male with that of someone who's great at meditation/enlightened, e.t.c. There have been brainwave studies done on various types of men and what they seem to show is that at least on average, the "beta" males' thinking is very erratic and cluttered.

Not that I have skin in the game of defending the proper use of "beta" and "alpha", but I think you can extend those terms to apply to things outside merely the quantity and frequency of thoughts. Elliott's point is that you want good "quality thoughts". If you have a lot of good quality thoughts, the quantity and frequency of thoughts don't matter (which is of course bullshit, but yeah).

[Danioover9000]

@Jacobsrw

1 hour ago, Jacobsrw said:

This is a a complete misunderstanding of meditation. When done with the right integration work, it is one of the most powerful tools available.

This is the sort of misconceptions that get spun by naive meditators who fail to see its purpose. Threatening suppressed baggage surfaces and they panic as if this is a bug in the system. Quite the contrary. The only reason one contracts following meditation, is because the underpinnings of their inner demons are being exposed. This gives provides them the very opportunity to not only deal with them but also develop the capacity to deal with challenge much more competently in the future.

A entrepreneur or heavily pragmatic individual could only benefit from experiencing such “mind-blankness”. It allows space for awareness, clarity, reorganisation and creativity. One who relentlessly thinks, is doing no more good than a car driven on tyres that never get been replaced. 
Using the mind till exhaustion can quickly become a disease.

   This somewhat contradicts contemplation. If you're relentlessly thinking thoughts that have negative features, then yes that is taxing for the mind, but what about positive thinking? Or the Kuon practices done in Zen temples, aimed at exausting the mind till enlightenment occur?

[Jacobsrw]

5 hours ago, Danioover9000 said:

@Jacobsrw

   This somewhat contradicts contemplation. If you're relentlessly thinking thoughts that have negative features, then yes that is taxing for the mind, but what about positive thinking? Or the Kuon practices done in Zen temples, aimed at exausting the mind till enlightenment occur?

Positive thinking can be good, however, it must be balanced. Overthinking is debilitating irrespective of the content being thought about. Overthinking can lead to overstimulation and the inability to sit still or organise ones mental activity in a competent manner. 

The problem is not thinking but the continual attachment to thinking. Also, as a side note, from my understanding contemplation is not a practice of relentless thinking but rather one of deriving insight from allowing information to naturally surface. This is somewhat an intuitive practice which is facilitated by thoughts in order to convey the insights. As such, thoughts are not the prime directive in contemplation but rather the insight that comes forth after using them.

Edited September 2, 2020 by Jacobsrw

[Aspiraling Wizard]

22 hours ago, Corpus said:

The waveforms on an EEG do not measure consciousness or tell anything about the degree of cluttered thinking; the most "beta" guy could make his EEG show "alpha"  waves by sitting quietly with eye closed. Your conflation of neurophysiology and reproductive psychology is not accurate.

I never said they did, overall consciousness is far too elusive and multifaceted to be measured in that way. What those machines do measure can be useful in giving a general idea of where a person is at and BASED on the results and patterns of these measurements and studies, we can relatively reliably place someone in a category of "alpha", "beta" e.t.c. and these catagorizations should as a rule be held loosely because states of consciousness are ultimately impermanent. 

"The most beta guy could make his EEG waves show Alpha by sitting quietly": Unless he has good breathwork and/or meditation training and experience, I would submit to you that he could not do this. If the average person could easily shift their state like this, the world would look a LOT different than it appears now.

As far as a purported conflation between these two fields, I don't know what I don't know about these fields. Are there relative differences? 99.9% certain. But are there dots you can connect between the two. I would submit that there are. The mind and body function together, even if there is relative disharmony in a particular person. Are you a qualified Neurophysiologist AND a qualified Reproductive Psychologist?

[Aspiraling Wizard]

22 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Not that I have skin in the game of defending the proper use of "beta" and "alpha", but I think you can extend those terms to apply to things outside merely the quantity and frequency of thoughts. Elliott's point is that you want good "quality thoughts". If you have a lot of good quality thoughts, the quantity and frequency of thoughts don't matter (which is of course bullshit, but yeah).

Again I would submit that there are and you can draw new distinctions between them with relative accuracy and usefulness depending on the distinctions and your level of knowledge, experience and understanding.

Edited September 2, 2020 by Aspiraling Wizard

[Carl-Richard]

2 minutes ago, Aspiraling Wizard said:

Again I would submit that there are and you can draw new distinctions between them with relative accuracy and usefulness depending on the distinctions and your level of knowledge, experience and understanding.

I have no idea what you just responded to.