Comment by TacticalCoder
3 days ago
> It's great that westerners are exploring these things ...
> This is literally yoga and meditation practice and has been studied for at least a couple thousand years.
> Even if we exclude the modern invention of yoga as exercise in the 20th century, there are seated practices of releasing these tensions in the body.
You are very clearly opposing eastern meditation practice and science, saying science held westerners back but let me give an example...
I've got a tense spot somewhere, I do practice meditation since a long time and I definitely can relax myself using breathing techniques etc. That's great.
But one of my very best friend lost, 15 years ago, both kidneys and had a kidney transplanted from his mom (she was compatible and willing to give one). As to my wife, she suffers from an auto-immune disease: but thanks to medication she lives a normal life (and thankfully doesn't have a reduced life expectancy).
So my questions is simple: you talk about "thousands of years". Easterners had "thousands of years" and they can... Release tension in the body?
Shall we now have a talk about science and ask the inverse question: weren't easterners held back by their meditation practice while westerners invented: MRI, X-ray, antibiotics, insulin, kidney transplantation, heart transplantation, artificial heart, in vitro fecondation, polio vaccine, anesthesia, chemotherapy, stethoscope, microscope, ...
And that's just a tiny list. I could go on and on. Versus... Relaxing tension in the body?
I'm not exactly sure who's been held back by what here.
> So my questions is simple: you talk about "thousands of years". Easterners had "thousands of years" and they can... Release tension in the body?
This is a common misconception among those used to modern “western” medicine: while “eastern” medicine does have a range of options to deal with existing medical conditions the emphasis is always on prevention (there’s a famous Chinese medical maxim along the lines of it being better to fight the enemy outside the city walls than inside) whereas Western medicine mostly pays lip service to the idea (for reasons that unfortunately mostly come down to money).
There is no denying that our modern medicine is superior in treating the immediate symptoms (which may well be life threatening) including surgery.
The relaxation exercises being discussed are really there just for the purpose of making sitting meditation effective, essential to stop the body getting in the way of the practice and that is all. In a way the body (and the associated work required to keep it in health) is seen as a necessary evil by those on the spiritual cultivation path.
I never said they're in opposition to each other. I'm an advocate of science and I think we should absolutely be studying what's going on with the body as we undertake these practices. If anything I find the Buddha's teachings on self-investigation and not taking any of his words at face value to be very compatible with scientific curiosity [1]. There is no "because I said so" on this path.
As I said elsewhere in the thread, what I take issue with is that many westerners try to ignore thousands of years of investigation and practice, to only waste a lot of time trying to come up with things on their own. And not even by following a map already laid out while collecting data or whatever, they're trying to discover the map on their own.
The author was contemplating an idea that is a pretty basic, known concept. Like absolutely, let's collect a bunch of data with some meditators doing various practices and see what's going on with transformations of smooth muscle over time. But let's not push away the millions of people that have done these practices just because they're Asian or wearing robes or talk about Nirvana/Samsara and that makes you feel uncomfortable.
I'm grateful to modern scientific discovery and I'm also grateful to all the teachers on this path that have helped liberate my mind. Both can be true at the same time. We shouldn't get caught up in thinking of things in binaries.
[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.th...