Why Corporations Want You To Shut Up And Meditate

lampofred

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Why Corporations Want You to Shut Up and Meditate

I thought this was a good article.

I think certain kinds of meditation can be very beneficial in certain contexts, but I think this corporate mindfulness trend that is going on is taking away focus from serious issues in the environment.
 

Jigend

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While there's (a lot of) validity in this claim, it does not detract from the value of meditation in any way. Corporations will also want you to eat in order to be a better performing wageslave. And that doesn't remove any merit from the idea of having good food.
 

redsun

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While there's (a lot of) validity in this claim, it does not detract from the value of meditation in any way. Corporations will also want you to eat in order to be a better performing wageslave. And that doesn't remove any merit from the idea of having good food.

So I guess if corporations don't tell us to eat we won't?
 

redsun

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strawman?

The point is making an analogy with eating and meditation is the worst analogy you could make. Eating is necessary, meditation is not. Corporations want people to do a lot of things, sometimes they are beneficial to us, sometimes not.
 

yerrag

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This reminds me of communists calling religion an opium for the masses.

I used to scoff at the idea, but there is merit to that idea though.

But I don't think meditation is meant to make us disconnected, but to be more connected and grounded. If it affects our spirituality positively, then it is no longer following the dictates of a religion serving a monarchy, or a theocracy, or a plutocracy. But if the practice makes us blissfully unaware and become apathetic, then it would certainly favor the status quo. But meditation isn't the only way. Gladiator sports were used in Rome. We have sports and Netflix binge-watching these days. Those are easy sells. Meditation is a hard sell.
 
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Corporations are implementing more and more mind control techniques from religions. Meditations are the way to create obidient zombies. Basically meditation is a supression of neo-cortex activity. Done repeatedly it rewires brain to stop using neo-cortex. No neo-cortex means no critical thinking, no reasoning and most importantly no semantic memories. Semantic memories is how we reflect surrounding world in our brain and create it's model to interact with the world. No semantic memories means whatever they say to you about the world you accept as true. Every religion from small cults to worldwide presented religions uses various meditations to reshape your own world model to their favor.
 
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You probably gonna read an opposite view on meditation even in scientific literature. Ok you could call me conspirasist. I went through various ashrams/monasteries/gurus in India and SE asia. And Ive seen detreminal consequences of meditations. I have seen friends and random people went from active, bright, thinking persons to obidient, zombified, sluggish, insane freaks in a matter of a couple of years, sometimes even in 2-3-6 months.
 
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yerrag

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I have a friend who now goes to India to practice meditation. For some time already he's been telling me physical sickness is all in the mind. I don't discuss health stuff anymore. I think that it's sometimes easier to believe in the simplicity of mind over matter. And I don't refer to the will, I'm talking belief. It's like the "Our Father-" thy will be done. It is not being willful when we just accept. When we consign to prayer what is physically or even, biochemically or physiologically impossible.

Catholic hospitals are prone to that in my opinion. Nuns and priests pray over the patients as they are being poisoned and preyed upon by the hospital and medical complex. All the prayers do is make the dying (aka human profit centers) feel good.

I think that when the Catholic nuns set up the hospitals then, hospitals were run with care and compassion. Now, hospitals have become cesspools. The only miracle that happens nowadays is when you elect not to go to a hospital, and survive, living well beyond their expectations.

n.b. It's not just Catholic hospitals by the way. It's sad that practically all hospital are this way. Hospital are now top money makers and their oligopolic status makes them easy prey for corporations. They know it's a no-brainer for hospital to make insane profits year after year. And there's a built-in mechanism that puts these hospitals as charitable organizations in a way that perfectly describes what a wolf would look like in sheep's clothing. They're a magnet for good people who want to "visit the sick" as one of the Catholic works of mercy, and so the sheen rubs off on the bloodthirsty hospital system.
 
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If they start to say "everything is in your head" they are baked. It's a point of no return. Those countries are ****88 ecologicaly wise exactly because of this thinking. It's not environment that is already destroyed and kills all the planet its your head. Have you been in India? There are mountains of garbade, air pollution, there is no even one clean river left. They say we it doesn't really matter they say India is spiritual not physical country. They say only karma what matter but don't realize that polluting the planet is actually a karmic action because it is a slow murder of every creature alive on this planet.
 

yerrag

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If they start to say "everything is in your head" they are baked. It's a point of no return. Those countries are ****88 ecologicaly wise exactly because of this thinking. It's not environment that is already destroyed and kills all the planet its your head. Have you been in India? There are mountains of garbade, air pollution, there is no even one clean river left. They say we it doesn't really matter they say India is spiritual not physical country. They say only karma what matter but don't realize that polluting the planet is actually a karmic action because it is a slow murder of every creature alive on this planet.

Even if they don't say that, they will say that they are in a perpetual journey to perfection. Yeah, that gives us hope, doesn't it? It's like Facebook when asked by Tim Pool why they ban so and so, they will just say something to the effect that their algorithms aren't perfect and they're working on it. Blaming algorithms is simply an excuse to get away with murder. Blaming imperfection is just as good a way to have the license to mess things up.
 

Hugh Johnson

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You probably gonna read an opposite view on meditation even in scientific literature. Ok you could call me conspirasist. I went through various ashrams/monasteries/gurus in India and SE asia. And Ive seen detreminal consequences of meditations. I have seen friends and random people went from active, bright, thinking persons to obidient, zombified, sluggish, insane freaks in a matter of a couple of years, sometimes even in 2-3-6 months.
I am sure you are correct in your perception of what happened with these people, yet I am not convinced you can blame it all on meditation. There are a lot of issues with a lot of the paths we see around the world, and Adam Watts did point out that meditation should be treated like a medicine. Many of the people in these spiritual paths do a lot more than 15 minutes of mindfulness, yoga, or whatever a day, which is what the corporations recommend. They fast, they do all kinds of crazy mediations with goals I could not understand, they go to retreats with meditions and work that lasts all day and often are not even allowed to sleep and eat as they wish...

It's also not clear what increase in the activity of the pro-frontal cortex actually does. Most people try to control their action, calculate and manipulate, and these are very human actions and if that is the core of your value system, then meditation could very well do that. There are opposite ways to go about this too, some spiritual paths focus on getting the story out of the way to allow for the conciousness to shine. So these tools can work both ways.
 

Literally

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Basically meditation is a supression of neo-cortex activity. Done repeatedly it rewires brain to stop using neo-cortex. No neo-cortex means no critical thinking, no reasoning and most importantly no semantic memories. Semantic memories is how we reflect surrounding world in our brain and create it's model to interact with the world.

I went through various ashrams/monasteries/gurus in India and SE asia. And Ive seen detreminal consequences of meditations. I have seen friends and random people went from active, bright, thinking persons to obidient, zombified, sluggish, insane freaks in a matter of a couple of years, sometimes even in 2-3-6 months.

@methylenewhite your comments reminded me of an expose that came out in the last several years about the striking number of people (I cannot remember the exact percentage but I think it was over 10%) who have various kinds of mental breakdowns and other mental health issues after getting into any kind of serious meditation program, and how it had been covered up by the promoters of meditation in the West. Can't find it now.

At one point in the past I did a lot of research into hypnosis and what I found was that there was a lot of confusion around raising consciousness versus lowering consciousness. A lot of techniques that are promoted as consciousness-raising are literally the opposite. Which tells you a lot of people don't have the slightest idea of whether they are raising or lowering their consciousness. There are a bunch of psysiological signs that help indicate this, e.g. whether the pupils dilate or contract.

What you said about neo-cortex activity would go right along with this. although I have read more about brain wave frequencies than the specific regions. I cannot help but think of parallels to serotonin as understood by the Peat community. Many people outside this community have a fundamental confusion about whether they are in a stress state or not. They are told to do things to "reduce stress" that in fact drive the serotonin cycle.

Neither serotonin or meditation are "bad" in and of themselves, but in both cases it's easy to get into trouble when a person has a fundamental confusion about what kind of state they promote/reflect. I think meditation is fine if you recognize that you are temporarily retreating to a happy place as a stress response, if it's not the only method of dealing with stress... but terrible if you think you are achieving spiritual enlightenment.

The parallel would, I suppose, be the sort of people who think they are awesome on a more practical level by maxing out their own serotonin-promoting behaviors. Oh wait, that actually describes to a tee the "type A" crowd, who tend to run the show.
 

Hugh Johnson

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Meditation is not "retreating to a happy place" although it can be. The dangers of meditation are widely recognized in the spiritual field, and there is a reason why many practices used to be secret. You can just do a search on "meditation dangers" and you will find people discussing it. Meditating is like being on a diet. The word can mean almost anything, from avoiding PUFA to IF to keto.
 

ken

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I worked at a Buddhist Center for a couple of weeks, I'm a construction worker. So we were remodeling the business office. At the end of a row of small shops there was a Coffee Shop. The proprietor was a middle aged Lama. So I taught him my self created Buddhist chant. Latte Latte, Para-Latte, para sam latte, Bohdi saha. He started laughing and said Yeah I'm supposed to be pushing the Dharma, but I'm pushing latte's instead. But it's all the same. When I'd stop for coffee over the years he would greet me with our adaptation of this mantra and we would chant it wildly to the consternation of the customers.
 

Regina

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I worked at a Buddhist Center for a couple of weeks, I'm a construction worker. So we were remodeling the business office. At the end of a row of small shops there was a Coffee Shop. The proprietor was a middle aged Lama. So I taught him my self created Buddhist chant. Latte Latte, Para-Latte, para sam latte, Bohdi saha. He started laughing and said Yeah I'm supposed to be pushing the Dharma, but I'm pushing latte's instead. But it's all the same. When I'd stop for coffee over the years he would greet me with our adaptation of this mantra and we would chant it wildly to the consternation of the customers.
hahahahaha. How will I chant Heart Sutra without a little smile now.
 

yerrag

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Even if they don't say that, they will say that they are in a perpetual journey to perfection. Yeah, that gives us hope, doesn't it? It's like Facebook when asked by Tim Pool why they ban so and so, they will just say something to the effect that their algorithms aren't perfect and they're working on it. Blaming algorithms is simply an excuse to get away with murder. Blaming imperfection is just as good a way to have the license to mess things up.
I meant Twitter.
 

ken

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Regina, I took Lama G and a couple of young Tibetan students to visit a Whirling Dervish music teacher one evening just a bunch of students and dinner in the basement of an interfaith church. Music and chanting and food. The next day he introduced me to Coke Studio Pakistan on the internet. He is from Bhutan but said he spent a lot of time when younger in India and loved going to the Qawailli performances. Anyway, I'm sure our version of the Heart Sutra has now made it back to the Himalaya's.
 

jzeno

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Crux:

>In the wrong hands, he argues, mindfulness can become an instrument for corporate compliance. Rather than organize to change the need for self-care and breathing exercises in the first place, he writes, corporate mindfulness, or McMindfulness, becomes a pacifier that teaches workers to be comfortable with insecurity. Emotions like stress and anger are purely subjective, arising not from precarious labor conditions but from within—all in your head.

Makes a good argument. Never been a fan of meditation in the Eastern sense. Biblical sense is beneficial for me, though. Biblical sense = meditating on a passage or an idea.
 

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