I’ve been putting off meditation for 30 years, but that’s after about a year of it in my teens. Meditation has positive impacts, like lowering blood pressure and heart rate. Probably reminds the body of our evolutionary history as creatures that hibernated in the winters, like bears. Hibernation is a good way to tide over scarce seasons - the metabolic rate drops and fat reserves from the previous summer suffice to bridge the cold, lean months.
Eastern philosophy and logic calls to mind the other Gotama of the nyaya school and hetuvidya (logic).
That’s very close to what I meant.
I think the perception of “eastern meditation” in the west is biased.
The Eastern philosophy is about rigorous meta-thinking, rather than some “trip” or “wellness” what west thinks. Orientalism is still alive.
Mathematical necessity can still count as a kind of cause. Perhaps “causality” tends to have a more physical and inductive connotation for native English speakers.
I mean, it seems like that @Banno and @Wayfarer thinks Eastern meditation something far away from logical reasoning and thinks it as something mythical or illogical.
There is ‘meditation’ in Descartes’ sense. He called a number of his philosophical essays ‘meditations’ as he was contemplating deep ideas and themes in philosophy. There are also the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoic emperor. That is the traditional use of the word ‘meditation’ in Western culture.
In Eastern culture, ‘meditation’ is connected with yogic practices of developing single-pointed attention, inner stillness, and finally states of trance (called ‘jhana’). However in my experience, very few modern people who pursue meditation in the Eastern sense are able to enter into those kinds of trance states. It can be done, but it’s not easy.
One Zen monk from Japan who was visiting a Zen retreat center in America observed the enthusiasm and numbers of meditators with astonishment. “How do you get them to meditate without beating them?” he asked. In his training temple in Japan, the young monks disliked meditation, and saw it as an unpleasant burden - Most Buddhists don’t Meditate, Lewis Richmond
And those meditative states are not commonplace even in Eastern culture, where it is associated with particular kinds of individuals who’s dispositions are said to be suitable for those states.
Meditation has entered popular culture as a kind of panacea, a simple practice which will lead to inner peace and a sense of fulfilment and wonder at life. And that is true — to an extent.
Some traditions like Zen Buddhism highly focus on intuition but I think the general subject of eastern philosophy and meditation is more about rigorous critical meta-level thinking.
I don’t know about now, but back when the Indians and Chinese developed meditation logic was a stub. They couldn’t have been … logically rigorous. Hence stuff like rainbow body
Probably I might be biased and want to believe that the logical rigor of the East is no less than the West. However, it is not an AB question. I won’t deny the fact that the Western logic is more rigor than the East, but also I think the Western understanding of the Eastern culture and philosophy is also biased by Orientalist perspective…such as LSD users in the 60s.
You’re probably right but there’s some stereotyping going on in there somewhere.
There are those who attribute the rise of science and allied fields like math and logic to Christianity colliding with Plato and Aristotle; the latter developed categorical logic. Then there’s Euclid’s The Elements that set the standard for logical rigor (in mathematics). No such ideological reactions took place in either China or India in the same time period, nor did they have works like The Elements or The Organon (logic?) to study. In India the Nyaya school stands out for making impressive advancements in logic (read my previous post). In China and to a lesser extent in India logic was kind of stuck with domains like jurisprudence, politics and proto-science. This makes us appreciate the genius of Euclid, Aristotle and Chrysippus and those who were to follow.
Yes, there was the Islamic golden age. Averroes declared that truth was one and that philosophy, a suitcase term back then, and religion were not at odds with one another and differences were to be resolved by reinterpreting scripture. However, in the end Islam won, some blackballed mathematics as the philosophy of Al-Shaitan, and the word is that they haven’t recovered yet from that disaster.
With Christianity a similar situation developed (the Galileo affair, Giordano Bruno, etc.) but Thomism must’ve saved Europe from a similar catastrophe, St. Thomas having borrowed from Averroes the idea of the unity of truth.
Chinese logic can’t be used in modern mathematics, to derive theorems from axioms. That’s what I meant.
My view is that this difference has more to do with fundamental differences between civilizations than with any specific events or individuals. For example, there are significant linguistic differences, as European languages tend to place greater emphasis on explicit logical structure and precision than many East Asian languages.
That’s part of what I meant - logical rigor isn’t possible without explicitness. Have you tried doing math in what I suppose to you is Eastern logic? Math didn’t flourish in China to the extent it did in Greece and Europe. Mathematics is our only hope of communicating with aliens (if they exist), unless you think they’re also into speaking in circles.
