When taught rooted in a mystical spiritual tradition, yoga and meditation are enormously important ingredients in quieting the influence of the ego.
When taught as productivity or wellness hacks, yeah, you'd get the result that this study did.
It's not about how good you look doing Downward Dog. It's about taking a break from the incessant mind-chatter, and getting a chance to experience the present moment, whether through movement or stillness.
Also, "quieting the ego" while also living in a western setting is a complicated thing at best and a bad mistake at worst.
If you stop caring about success or material gain, then at some point the desire to be competitive and efficient just fades away.
which seems to be claiming that it's not a guarantee that you think less of yourself, statically,
but that it's more likely you weight yourself properly due to having taken the time to achieve enlightenment in that interval? (aka figure things out deeply/systemically)
Just anecdotally, the "yoga, spiritual, new age" people I know are BY FAR the most egotistical group of people I have ever met. I lived in Bali as a digital nomad where these people are one of the core cohorts and it is very noticeable.
Interestingly they are also, again anecdotally, on average a standard deviation or two more attractive than Americans on average. I think it is somehow related to a people who have grown up with people fawning over them and having people hanging off of their words and confirming everything they say and do. Then someone comes along and tells them that they can control their destiny and reality with their mind and crystals or whatever and it feels intuitively correct to them. Then they start projecting these ideas and get lots of positive feedback from their echo chamber.
I have definitely experienced the type of people you're talking about, and they exist in all settings, but I would caution you from developing cynicism toward all practitioners. Virtue/morality/integrity is a key aspect of spiritual practice, one that many worldly people find inconvenient and therefore ignore, which is how you get the type of people you saw in Bali.
You can find these people at spiritual centers more rooted in tradition (ashrams, monasteries), but they are far less common in my experience. There are real practitioners out there who fully embrace the practice and the relinquishment and restraint it requires, and when you are in the presence of these beings you can see the beautiful results.
Empirically, egotism and narcissism really get in the way of the kind of mindset that's required for serious insight. It's not so much that meditation makes you less egotistic, it's more the case that you just can't afford to keep feeding those character traits if you're serious about wanting to attain even low-level stream entry, let alone any deeper form of enlightenment.
As an aside, enlightenment isn't even that much of a big deal intellectually so there isn't all that much to talk about. Almost all of the purely intellectual content that you'd grok in the process of doing insight meditation, you could find in a good book about, e.g. philosophical Stoicism. There's plenty more insight besides, but as far as we know it's tacit insight that's really hard to describe to outsiders unless for the purpose of actively engaging in the practice.
> Then someone comes along and tells them that they can control their destiny and reality with their mind and crystals or whatever
Magick is a real thing in this context, but if you're surprised about the "control their destiny and reality" part you're very much missing the point, and taking your perspective on it from silly folk stereotypes. The most successful magick is (1) not engaged in foolishly or for personal, egotistic gain, but rather in pursuit of goals that are going to deeply benefit others. Stated simply, you very much want to go with the collective flow, not against it. (2) not seeking "supernatural" or paranormal outcomes except perhaps at the tiniest, most imperceptible level that would literally be indistinguishable from pure noise. That's not to say that 'unexplainable' things might not sometimes happen, they'll just be rare and always surprising to everyone involved, most of all the supposed initiator; (3) seeking hidden outcomes as opposed to highly visible or evident ones. It's meant to be wholly complementary to the method and thought process of natural magick (i.e. science and tech) not in contrast with it!
They seem to be treating yoga and meditation separately. Perhaps, they need to understand that yoga has 8 limbs, one of which is asana (generally what most people consider yoga). Yoga has 4 limbs/levels of meditation. Suposedly, one can't have an ego to reach samadhi (the highest level of meditation). The yama, niyamas, asana (what most people yoga) and pranayama (breathing exercises) limbs of yoga are steps or precursors to the meditation. Seems like they don't know this and are testing beginners; I am not sure how meaningful that is. If they had a way to measure how compent each person was at each limb and then gave results based upon their skill at each limb, that would be interesting. Not sure how one would measure whether a person is competent at the 4 meditation levels.
You can do that without naming them as such. Try to do as much manual work as possible, without the aid of machines. Like exercises, running, etc. That will improve health.
Taking a walk in a park, getting up early and smelling the fresh scents of the morning, having a heartful chat with kids or spouse before sleep have the same effects as meditation.
Instead of trying to improve quality of life, we have degraded quality of life, through high stress work and high anxiety life. And to compensate for it, we get into these.
In my view, both are a waste of time, money and effort.
Yoga took off because it's a well-designed work out routine. There are many alternatives to it, but it's a system that effectively and efficiently achieves a benefit. That benefit is helping support posture and enough strength/flexibility in daily life without high risk of injury.
I don't even do yoga, but can appreciate it. There are alternative methods to achieving these results, but if you think "Try to do as much manual work as possible" is equivalent to exercise, you have never done manual work.
Your post completely misses the point of efficiency - "anything will get you there" is not the correct approach to anything. Want to eat with chopsticks? Hold them the right way. Want to support your muscle mass and flexibility into old age? Do Yoga (or an established western Calisthenics routine, or lift weights), but IMPORTANTLY DON'T "just do manual labor".
Any even semi-serious practitioner of meditation will know that most people won't see results in 4 weeks. This is impatience.
And if you approach meditation as a way to "get" something, this approach will not yield good results either. This is goal-driven "greed" (as referred to in the Buddhist tradition).
In order for meditation to "work", you have to come at it with a sense of goodwill, patience, openness, etc. and let the practice do you, not the other way around.
Some spiritual traditions and teachers (e.g classical yoga) treat this as a trap, it’s highly advised to forget about your practice and go about your day after the daily session. They maintain that the lifestyle will adjust (or not) naturally depending on one’s needs, and those needs are usually not what the ego wants at least in its initial condition. This includes talking to others about your practice in particular unacquainted ones, any drastic adjustments to one’s diet, schedule. Any sort of excitement or obsession about the practice are detrimental, at least from the classical yoga technology perspective. But then again as the top comment says this really depends on the approach, it seems like marketing such Oriental practices as productivity/wellness hacks with immediate effects provides more excitement and profitability than just following your sensations while steadily performing a few easy looking and un-complicated asanas.
Isn't it time to move on from Freudian language and stop using a word that has so many different meanings in the modern sense?
If we translated things today for the first time we would never translate these ideas to the word 'ego'. I am pretty sure this is just a relic of the times of original translation and Freud's popularity at the time.
I just remember being young and thinking the idea was to quite your personality or destroy your personality. That is such a translation error and distortion of the message. A philosophical problem caused by highly imprecise language.
Everyone has to start somewhere. Most people have to make a commitment to the work and do it before they get to the place that is underneath thoughts and feelings. It takes time.
When considering these two studies together, I find a very interesting question to ask: Have we evaluated treatment of depression and anxiety as if they were self-enhancement disorders?
I would frame it slightly differently: Anxieties are projections: You have anxieties of certain aspects of yourself, you are afraid to show the complete self, and just be. The degree of which varies by the level of emotional support you received in early childhood.
Anxiety is simply the fear of dying. Anything else is a projection.
In early childhood, if you don't receive the support you NEED FOR SURVIVAL, you develop strategies to manipulate the caregiver to receive that support. Broadly speaking, the first level of manipulation is anger/rage, the second is sadness, the third is resignation/depression, and in the fourth stage you develop psychosomatic symptoms.
As long as the underlying broken self image ("I cannot just be myself, or I will not receive the level of support I NEED for survival") is not addressed, you "stay a child" that needs external support, and continue to fall back into these strategies later in your life, especially in partnerships and raising children (mother/father replay).
If you read any eastern literature, you'll find a deep philosophical perspective that comes with those eastern practices. But they want to import, measure and understand those practices using the scientific/capitalistic/individualistic lens and then come and make bold statements such as the one in the tile to something they clearly don't understand.
The way I understood it, is that the ego is the abstraction that society and by extension individuals places on the self, when a monk or a spiritual person lets go of everything society tries to label him with, and silence then mind, his mind is not noisier than that of a dog or other animals. But if you are doing Yoga and meditation while constantly thinking about self-improvement, then that is the opposite of what those practices are aiming for which is letting go.
Personally, I think the concept of self has merits on many occasions. Having self-confidence, self-love, self-esteem etc, are all useful, especially in social settings.
But sometimes, it is beneficial to tune that concept down. When someone is struggling, not doing well in life, and having many negative and self-critical thoughts, perhaps it is better to tune those thoughts down and just focus on whatever is at hand.
In defense of the paper, anyone who's spent time in yoga centers or even monasteries has noticed this effect occasionally. It's possible to meet someone there whose giant ego and total lack of self-awareness makes you cringe. It's happened to me.
But skimming this paper left me feeling sad. I can't blame the scientists for not knowing better, as this is what we are trained to do. Reproducibility, large sample sizes, p-values, Bayesian methods, etc.
The problem is that Buddhist meditation (among other spiritual paradigms) doesn't suit these techniques at all. Meditation isn't like penicillin or insulin. You can't easily do a double-blind placebo controlled experiment on mediation, and two people sitting quietly in meditation can be doing completely different things.
Plus, the Buddhist path is not linear at all, nor does it prescribe meditation in 15 minute chunks at the end of the workday as they do in this study. It's an entire reimagining of one's way of life that that not only involves extensive periods of meditation in isolation, but also self-reflection and practicing morality.
At monasteries, for example, monks typically go on retreat for three months out of the year (which means they mostly sit in meditation during that time.) To even become a monk you have to relinquish your money and belongings. Monks are not even allowed to own anything beyond a bowl and a robe and even shave their face (including their eyebrows) as a way of undifferentiating themselves from one another and softening the attachment to the self. All this is to say that if meditation were enhancing one's sense of self, monasteries wouldn't be doing it.
As far as the study methods go, how do monks score on questions such as "How central is it for you to be free from envy?" If they score highly, does that reflect a high sense of self-centrality? Why?
Publishing a study with a title like that feels like a mic-drop moment -- ha, we got them -- but what it shows, to me anyway, is a deep naivete of a several-thousand-year-old tradition.
I say this as a scientist and a meditator. I'm optimistic that in the future we'll do better than this.
This last part is off-topic but if I still have your attention and you're curious, there are a few topics that I think are completely understudied that will hopefully get some meaningful scientific attention in the coming years. Maybe you'll be the one to write the paper!
1. The chakras. They are actually not bullshit. But what are they? Are they purely proprioceptive (i.e. only appear to be located in the body, but aren't) or are do they have an actual analogue in the body, like nerve ganglia. I don't know.
2. Tummo. This is getting some traction now because it's a completely wild that people can heat up their bodies with their minds. The heat apparently starts in the navel chakra and works its way up the "central channel" or "shushumna".
3. The intersection between pranayama and sleep ("yogi sleep" or yogis who only need a few hours of sleep a night.)
4. The "signature" of awakening. I've heard Andrew Holecek describe awakening as "like waking up into a lucid dream, but way way bigger." Is there a signature of this in the mind that you can see somewhere, say in an fMRI?
Pretty much what my reaction was when I skimmed the paper. I left the page amused about how can someone measure degree of self-enhancement? It's not something like having a consensus that boiling point of water is 100 degree celsius at 1 atm.
When taught as productivity or wellness hacks, yeah, you'd get the result that this study did.
It's not about how good you look doing Downward Dog. It's about taking a break from the incessant mind-chatter, and getting a chance to experience the present moment, whether through movement or stillness.