"Narcissistic" is a word bandied about a lot in America these days, and not just with regard to our infamous president. Indeed, individualism led to a widespread narcissism that gave rise to Trumpism, and Trumpism has in turn catalyzed narcissism. It appears to have gone Someone even wrote to me saying, without a hint of irony, “I started meditating last spring and have truly grown to love and appreciate it.
But I have just left my meditation group because it is so dysfunctional: the teacher is narcissistic and some of the followers as Narcissism has become a meme and a cultural virus. The word refers to a common trait in North America’s globalized culture -- extreme self-centeredness. A narcissist invariably projects their negative traits onto others.
Thus narcissism has significantly contributed to the rampant polarization in the The incongruity of a purported teacher of meditation being narcissistic is absurd. Of course, a glib brander of meditation as ‘navel staring’ wouldn’t think it incongruous at all, since looking within is inherently an exercise in self-involvement to their way of Though it should go without saying, methodless meditation is not narcissism or navel staring. Essentially, meditation is the negation of self-centeredness in gathering undirected attention through passive watchfulness.
In short, there is no center in meditation, and therefore in a meditative state, there is no separate I'm not referring to innumerable forms of meditation, which are essentially exercises in mental control, from breath watching to the Finnish fellow who runs marathons in the arctic snow without shirt or The mind can do incredible things using its powers of concentration, as evident from science and technology. But concentration is completely distinct from non-directed attention in meditation. Effortlessly, attention during meditation acts like a laser burning through the dross and sludge of experience stored in memory and mistaken for consciousness. Meditation is not an effort of the mind as thought, but the effortless dissolution of thought’s noise and emotional accretion.
The witless complainants of meditation as navel staring are unwittingly right about one thing however. To begin with the illusion of “my consciousness” is to end in solipsism and narcissism.
However, begin with the realization that each one of us manifests a portion of the entirety of content-consciousness, and that the whole of human consciousness, past and present, is enfolded within us like a hologram, and meditation takes on a completely different Another person wrote to say, “I actually think non-human animals are, in many ways, superior to human beings because they are authentic and unselfconscious…they don’t contemplate their navels like humans do.” When I emailed a response, I received the auto-reply, “I am out of the office at a meditation retreat.” people know, the word “narcissism” comes from the Greek myth about a “pathologically self-absorbed young man, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool.’” Freud believed some degree of narcissism was part of us since birth. Normalizing the tendency, some psychologists now speak of “healthy narcissism.” Nonetheless, narcissism signifies extreme self-centeredness and selfishness -- a person who habitually and pathologically puts him or herself first, and manipulatively uses others. Within a person or a people, true traits, when accentuated, don't counteract false ones; but false features, when unaddressed, diminish This is why the American diktat to “accentuate the positive” has had the opposite effect. It has allowed the harms of individualism to accumulate in the culture and body politic through willful negligence and In a sick society, everyone is infected with its main virus to one degree or another.
Living in a narcissistic culture, an honest man or woman asks, how self-centered am I? If one is self-knowing, and honestly questions oneself, the virus of narcissism is checked and not spread to one’s children and grandchildren. narcissist is not, as the myth goes, simply in love with their own image. They may just as likely hate themselves, or be in love with vicious circles, finding sick comfort in the certainty of sinking into the pit. Often, a narcissist exhibits classic criminal mentality.
Confronted with the destructiveness of their extreme self-centeredness, they bemoan how bad it makes them feel. That can initially pass for conscience, but one soon realizes it just completes the vicious circle of self-centeredness. Why, despite a thriving retreat industry isn’t extreme self-centeredness being addressed and redressed? Indeed, as a plethora of therapists, life coaches, meditation teachers, yoga instructors and retreat owners have grown, the extent of narcissism has increased.
Is it because with the erosion and breakdown of society and family, and fearing death in a purportedly meaningless universe, the illusory permanence of the individual self is clung to as if it is life itself? Be that as it may, authentic meditation begins with the negation of the separate observer and dissolves the self as center. The universe has no center, why do we? © Scoop Media