Patrice Berube:
"Do you really think that meditation, and spending weeks in silence, removed from society, not talking etc... is natural?
Why not? It occurs within nature. Everything that ever happens is natural.
Did you ever see an animal do this?
I never saw a non-human animal make an argument. Is making arguments unnatural?
Why would human do something like this, in the context of evolution...
Why are we limiting what is acceptable for a human to do to with what jives with evolution? Humans do many things that do not increase, or even decrease, the probability of survival and reproduction. This is a non-sensical criterion for deciding what is OK for a human to do. We may as well start civilization over from scratch.
Monks spending years isolated and not participating in society, putting themselves in really strange situations. It's certainly not normal.
"Normal" is defined with respect to the norms of a given culture. Within the culture of a monastery, isolation from society at large is quite normal.
Normal is an accident of history. Everything you do today is not normal compared to society thousands of years ago, or society thousands of years in the future. Why limit your behavior according to an accident of history?
Anyway, who is to say that behavior should be constrained to mimic everyone else's behavior?
Don't you think that perhaps it's a great delusion, people want to see those "jhanas" so much and after spending hours and months staring at a dot thinking "i want to see a jhana, i want to see a jhana", they will see whatever they wish to see.
If i stare at a dot on the wall for weeks on end and i want to see a glowing red rabbit talking to me, im pretty sure it will happen.
Plug that formula into any human endeavor. Don't you think that if you work long enough hours, thinking "success will make me happy, success will make me happy," you will feel whatever you wish to feel about work? Don't you think that if you try hard enough to be normal and natural, thinking "being normal and natural is the only way to be, being normal and natural is the only way to be," you will feel that being normal and natural is the only way to be?
I had my own clumsy answer but what i would really like is a precise, concise and clear answer that would satisfy someone who have this kind of doubt.
Concise:
- The arguments you make against meditation derive from an arbitrary way of looking at things. Without too much effort, you could just as well make an argument against anything a human could possibly do with their lives. Therefore this argument has no substance.
- There is nothing special about what is "natural" or "normal". "Normalcy" depends on an arbitrary context, plus an arbitrary way of looking at things. What is normal now was not normal yesterday, will not be normal tomorrow, is not normal to all people, and is not normal from other points of view. So we can't even clearly say what is normal or not. Not that it matters, because there's no fundamental reason to constrain behavior to be in agreement with what is judged to be normal to begin with.
- The arguments for meditation are ____ (fill in the blank with whatever benefits you are seeking to attain: understanding yourself, cultivating wholesome mind states and abandoning unwholesome ones, reducing suffering, whatever).