Types of meditation, reasons for same:

http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/11/sitting-in-chairs-is-not-zazen-part-one.html

I was fascinated by a recent Brad Warner blog (link above) in which he insisted that “sitting in chairs is not zazen.”

First because it jived with my feeling that “zazen” was a certain, separate type of meditation and one that was very much a physical activity and one that was done sitting cross legged on a cushion on the floor. This doesn’t mean that other types of “meditation” can’t be done in other postures or activities just that “zazen” as instructed by Dogen and then passed down by Soto zen teachers has certain specific parameters all it’s own.

Second, because it got me thinking about all the various types of meditation and all the various reasons humans may have to meditate. I’m going to list some of both off the top of my head and would like others to indulge me; if possible, by commenting and/or adding some of their own that I’ve missed.

Types of meditation:

Zazen

Samatha (concentration on the breath, discs, candles, etc. in order to develop one-pointed focus and enter jahanas, obtain psychic powers, bliss, etc.)

Vipassana

Kundalini (is this a type? A certain technique to “awaken” the kunkalini?)

Mantra meditation like TM (also a form of samatha I think)

Inquiry such as “who am I?” or meditating on a koan (these could be two different kinds)

Centering prayer such as taught by Thomas Keating

Shamanistic practices, methods to call up spirits and stuff? (is this a type of meditation?)

Chanting

Movement such as yoga, tai chi, etc.

The sort of secular mindfulness for stress reduction (I’m still not sure what this is, exactly)

Loving kindness/metta

What else? I’m sure I’m missing dozens.

Goals for mediation or reasons to meditate:

Stress reduction

Increase mental power

Become intimate with oneself and/or all of life

Achieve blissful states

Become awake/enlightened

Get psychic or magical powers or abilities

Become a more powerful, influential person

To have more peace and tranquility

To commune with one’s God

To communicate with the “spirit world.”

More?

Oh, Chris, so pithy...

I'm sorta familiar with having pithed people off, myself. But that probably doesn't count.

The only goal that really matters is "to wake up." The others are nice and can be done in other ways and may lead to a desire to awaken, but they are just anterooms, not the actual zendo

-cmarti

YES!!!

What more can I say?

Clearly I am the only person here fascinated by the world of meditation and all it's types and uses.

Clearly I am the only person here fascinated by the world of meditation and all it's types and uses.
[image]


-michaelmonson

Sorry, my mind goes blank at the thought of trying to evaluate or add to the list, which looks not bad at a glance. Now, I do somewhere have a list of all the known diets in the world, from Atkins and Ayurvedic to the Instincto Therapy and Zone diets. No idea what any of them are like, just thought it was funny to find a ginormous list of them.

You did check out the Wikipedia page, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

I always find that provides days of exploring whatever rabbit hole is currently fascinating me.

It's a subject that is normally of interest to me, but at the moment I'm in an incoherent, down phase, and thinking only makes things worse. Perhaps on the other side I can contribute-- but hard to say when that will be.

I'm fascinated by the question, Mike!

I've reflected on different broad practice styles in relation to different goals and understandings of the path, both in order to better understand people who are coming at it from a different angle from mine and to better understand myself since I tend to come at meditation and everything else in life from multiple angles.

I posted something a while back which might be related, at least tangentially, to what you're talking about.

In my first post there's a link to this guy's work studying different spiritual temperaments, that is, different inclinations people have towards spirituality, different motivations, different ways of approaching it. I find it really interesting. It may help shed light on why different people choose different paths, or why the same person may experience shifts in their orientation, as different temperaments come to the fore. Then if we add the psychological factors in, we can see how someone could naturally have a certain temperament yet be practicing as if they had a different temperament since that other temperament is normative in their sangha. Another reason why some people practice but don't really progress?

As to the question of different kinds of meditation I think that's very interesting as well. Certainly when you get into the nitty gritty of a specific lineage's "way" of doing things you get some interesting constraints as you point out. Just taking Zazen for example, I expect it is a rather different experience in a Soto and a Rinzai setting, and it makes me wonder how much the cultural aesthetic may play into the practice?

On a sidebar, I finally went to the annual gathering of the sanghas meeting in my area. It's been going on for six years-- since I moved to Vermont, actually-- but I've always had to work. I made it this last time and it was pretty cool. There were some Vipassana people, some Tibetan-style practitioners, and a large proportion of Soto practitioners from a temple in a nearby town. I met the priest(ess) there and she seemed very friendly, and she invited me over for tea and conversation before joining in their regular sittings. May be interesting. I'll admit I'm a bit trepidatious about sitting in such a formal environment... she wore the robes and everything to this meeting, and did some chanting and such, and I'm sure there's a whole ritual containment process operating at the temple and I know I'm not much into that sort of thing, but, we'll see.

Mike, let me know if you check out that linked thread of mine from a while back and if you think it's relevant to your topic here.
-Jake

It's a subject that is normally of interest to me, but at the moment I'm in an incoherent, down phase, and thinking only makes things worse. Perhaps on the other side I can contribute-- but hard to say when that will be.


-kategowen

I'm feeling similar to Kate. It's been difficult for me to get interested enough in something to write about it at length, which is unusual for me. You all know how much I like to write (and talk!). I suspect my enthusiasm for these topics will return in the near future.

Franny (my cat) just started a conversation with me, so I should probably wrap up this comment and see what's on her mind. ^..^

Ah, maybe this is a cat thing: maybe my cat's got my tongue...

Thanks everyone, sorry to whine.

I'm going through an interesting exploration of just doing samatha practice. And, like I think I mentioned earlier, it seems to be doing all kinds of good things to my brain.
For example, I'm spending more time with an open, kind of patient state of of mind, less eager to mentally look around for things to think about, do, stir up, chase after. And this, for some reason, has given me more positive energy to just jump into things more, to get more involved and engaged in all the people and stuff going on around me.
I like this of course and I want to learn more about it and hopefully cultivate it into even more openness.

I didn't know this would happen.

My earliest explorations of meditation were mostly just watching the breath but I rarely got very concentrated for any time at all. So, while there were benefits of course in just making the attempts stick with the object, I never got as concentrated and tranquil as I am getting now so the effects from that are really new.

Now, I'd often gotten really effective at the other kind of concentration, the vipassana/mindfulness kind, but this is different.

Well, Mike, my latest newsflash from Reality [to ME; I don't want to pontificate here] is samatha is using whatever works to sit still and open my eyes; vipassana is seeing/understanding things, situations, people, my life, my own behavior and thoughts, once samatha has made it possible. The Vajrayana teachings I've become familiar with seem to regard fixating on methods and experiences as detours.

If, as the Buddha purportedly said, there are 84,000 methods-- if I become obsessive about them, that's a lot of lifetimes in detour mode. On the downside, it's a bit scary to step off the treadmill of repeating known 'practice' and strike out on the unmapped territory of my life using insight as a compass.

The last thing I expected about 'killing the Buddha on the road' was that the Buddha was not going to be someone other than me.

Interesting.

Until now, really, my dharma practice has always been what I think they call "dry" -- vipassana without samatha.

I've just never made any real headway on concentrating so it was always just frustrating. But, I couple of weeks ago while doing vipassana, I kind of stumbled upon a way to finally start to concentrate.

Odd, the practice doesn't seem "spiritual" at all -- at least so far. It's so so so devoid of content and the benefits seem so completely self centered.

edit: I just thought about what I wrote above. I'm not sure the last part makes any sense. Why does "devoid of content" equal "not spiritual?" Why does it seem like greater well being, bliss, etc. equals "not spiritual?" What the hell is "spiritual?"

"After doing Transcendental Meditation and the TM Siddhi Programme for six years, Jan felt the need for a guru and found Gururaj Ananda Yogi whom he stayed with for three years. Then Jan’s Kundalini was so active, that he did not need any other guidance than what the Shakti gave, so he gave up on gurus and meditated by observing the inner Shakti’s workings. Following this, Jan began to be contagious and the Kundalini might spontaneously awaken in those that meditated with him. After some years, Jan met Amma and related to her as a spiritual master for about ten years. But again the Shakti guided Jan to meditate on his own and follow the inner guidance of the Shakti. Today Jan would describe his spirituality as being grabbed by Mother’s grace. The Divine Mother who resides in everybody as Kundalini Shakti and patiently waits to unfold as a vibrating field of love, bliss and grace." -- from a description of one of the "guests" on the Buddha at the Gas Pump site

This might be a good description of what is going on with "kundalini" meditation techniques

Interesting.
Until now, really, my dharma practice has always been what I think they call "dry" -- vipassana without samatha.
I've just never made any real headway on concentrating so it was always just frustrating. But, I couple of weeks ago while doing vipassana, I kind of stumbled upon a way to finally start to concentrate.
Odd, the practice doesn't seem "spiritual" at all -- at least so far. It's so so so devoid of content and the benefits seem so completely self centered.
edit: I just thought about what I wrote above. I'm not sure the last part makes any sense. Why does "devoid of content" equal "not spiritual?" Why does it seem like greater well being, bliss, etc. equals "not spiritual?" What the hell is "spiritual?"


-michaelmonson

I was going to reply exactly this point that you emphasize in your edit, which seems to be coming up in conversation after conversation with people lately.

>>>>>>Exactly, Mike. Exactly!!!! It's not "more spiritual" because it's got tingly stuff, flashing lights, visions of angels or pinwheels spinning in your eyes. It's not "more spiritual" because it makes you throw up, gives you insomnia, or makes your hands twitch. It's not "more spiritual" because it was like, so amazing, dude, you should have been there, oh my god. It's not "more spiritual" because you spent way more longer in some funky altered state than the next meditator.

The banal, the ordinary, the mundane, is just as important, spiritual, meaningful, sacred, whatever word you like to use. That's been a huge gigantic lesson for me over and over, and clearly for other people too, based on recent conversations.

We are so used to looking for cool amazing blissy ecstatic tingly bits (or even the icky, scary, weird bits) to call "success" "sacred" "spiritual" "signs of progress" and so used to just ignoring all the regular everyday stuff.

"Every moment is equally worthy of mindfulness."

Well, I do think a lot of good things happened for me from my vipassana-style noticing practices performed without any real skill at samatha. I know that I developed the ability to have continuous, sustained disembedded awareness of things with enough momentum to get to great states of equanimity and fruition -- all of which showed and continue to show me something impossible to convey with words. But I do know that, somehow, I've lost my previous urgency and desire for liberation. I feel like every moment I'm as liberated as I'm going to get for that moment and that the future will take care of itself and requires no help from me.

I don't want to be on a Path -- which is where I start to be a kind of dharma heretic, you know? Why am I on a site called "dharma refugees" if being told that something is true because it was something the Buddha said or taught has no influence or effect on whether or not I think it is real or true or important? Man, I just don't want to DO anything about myself anymore and the main thrust of my life now is carefully watching myself and if I detect any moment toward fixing, or changing, or developing myself towards some future goal or idea I drop that dangerous foul smelling shit as soon as I can.

However, I'm certainly wondering what may occur now as I begin to acquire some samatha skills. Will some new veil be lifted that I didn't even realize was there? I don't know.


Oh, and I think my concentration skills must have been somewhat good up until now but I'm enjoying seeing what happens if I do some real focused concentration meditation.

You know, there are so many ways to meditate (and even non-meditating practices for awakening), we have to remember that the specific approach used by one person (be it Dan Ingram, Kenneth Folk, any other teacher or friend or colleague) is what worked for them, but not necessarily best for you. Or any specific method or non-method may be just what you need for a time, but then not useful at another time. And too, someone else's story might be very motivating and inspiring for us, but that doesn't mean we have to do things exactly the way they did.

What works has so much to do with our own strengths and weaknesses. What can be the best approach for one person might feed right into another person's bad tendencies and get them stuck in an obsession or feed their ego and be totally counter-productive.

I think listening to one's intuition is a really good thing. Of course, for some people that wouldn't work because they don't know how to hear their own intuition and second-guess all their gut instincts.

I don't want to be on a Path -- which is where I start to be a kind of dharma heretic, you know? Why am I on a site called "dharma
refugees" if being told that something is true because it was something
the Buddha said or taught has no influence or effect on whether or not I
think it is real or true or important? Man, I just don't want to DO
anything about myself anymore and the main thrust of my life now is
carefully watching myself and if I detect any moment toward fixing, or
changing, or developing myself towards some future goal or idea I drop
that dangerous foul smelling shit as soon as I can.

-michaelmonson

I can understand not wanting to consider yourself as being on a "Path" (capital "P"), as in one or another stage of awakening. But, implicit in the concept of practice is the idea that one is hoping to get better at something. That is, "path" is just a metaphor for the temporal difference between your current skill level and some goal - even if that goal is simply the maintenance of your current abilities.

Semantics aside... of course you know that you don't have to be a Buddhist, or even care too much about what the Buddha supposedly said, to be a part of this forum. The only thing I really frown upon is obnoxious evangelizing, which doesn't go on here at all, especially from you.

I'm enjoying your posts, and I'm looking forward to hearing more about your samatha adventures. Keep us posted.

-Jackson

Nice Jackson.
It's so great to have a place where I can be myself and say what I want to say and have it be heard and considered. I love that.

Yes, that's exactly what Chris and I had in mind when we founded this place.