The best meditation book you never read?

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10 years 4 months ago - 10 years 4 months ago #16920 by Chris Marti

... I don't think there is anything on how it works, really.


I disagree - there's a lot on how it works in MCTB. Remember all the explanations of vibrations and the like, based on the practices Daniel advocates? That's Daniel's version of how it works - through breaking down the way you perceive objects.
Last edit: 10 years 4 months ago by Chris Marti.

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10 years 4 months ago #16943 by every3rdthought

shargrol wrote:

Chris Marti wrote:

I rarely hear an explanation of why meditation works.


I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to know why meditation works. Is there a book that could be said to be a good example of that?


I want to revive this question.


Personally I don't find this a question I have any interest in an answer to, although when I first started out with Buddhism I needed a complete philosophy that would explain what the problem was and how it could be resolved, in a way that I could accept and find logical, which was what was provided... but the reason I post here is to say, DOES meditation 'work'? It does some things for some people, and other things for others. People want and expect different things from it. Some practices don't work at all for some. Lots of people are dedicated practitioners for lengthy periods of time without waking up. Both 'meditation' and 'work' here seem like such broad categories that I'm not sure how they can have specific meaning. Indeed I think one of the problems that all of us PD types know but we often still come back to the familiar language because it's an easier shorthand, is that in the West there's a tendency to think 'meditation is a thing' but it's like saying 'exercise is a thing.' It can do more harm than good. It can do nothing. What do you want from it, how do you go about getting that, how do you know what to want from it, and how do you know how to go about getting that?

It's a long time since I read MCTB but from memory, Daniel doesn't say much about the paths beyond SE, and my impression is that the concept given is that you can just Mahasi-note your way all the way to 4th Path - and also, it has the paradigm that one needs to do as much retreat practice as possible and it's not likely that anyone'll make significant progress without doing this (or at least large amounts of daily practice, say 3 hours).

This may be slightly off topic but I think the issue in the Western scene is that most people don't actually have, or possibly want or know that it would be useful or know how to get, access to a reliable, awake teacher who they can speak to personally for a decent length of time on a regular basis, and no book will do that...

Having said that, what I'd like to see in a book is a really clear side-by-side comparison of different techniques - noting, breath concentration, kasina, visualisation, whatever - and what they produce, but even that could only be controversial because imagine trying to categories them according to samatha/vipassana, or outcomes, or whatever - it's all so context-specific in the final analysis.

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10 years 4 months ago #16956 by Chris Marti

... Daniel doesn't say much about the paths beyond SE...


Part III of MCTB is virtually all about post-stream entry practices but, yes, most of the book is about how to practice, what to practice, to get stream entry.

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10 years 4 months ago #16974 by jackhat1

Russell wrote: I agree about Adyashanti. "The End of Your World" is awesome. This free PDF is more instruction based and very good. www.adyashanti.org/wayofliberation/


Russell, thanks for the reference to the above pdf file. I have started reading his chapter on True Meditation before most sits. For over a year I have tried to have one meditation session a day using noting and the others being non-dual. To quote Adya: "True Meditation has not direction or goal. It is a pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer."

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