Not identifying and properly responding to dullness. So, just meditating in persistent dullness. Also, not sleeping enough, thus the dullness. Fixed the sleep and then started addressing dullness properly when it came up.

And who wouldn’t want to get rid of negative thoughts and mental static?

That’s not what the post is describing, though.

Are you sure?

Yes, quite sure, because I can read.

Now, if you want to make the claim that doing what the post describes will result in, as a consequence / side effect / whatever, get rid of “negative thoughts and mental static”, fair enough. Is that the claim you’re making?

Let’s be clear: this would be an additional claim, one which was not contained in the post itself. In fact, the only thing that bugsbycarlin explicitly claimed (in a follow-up comment) as a benefit, was this:

The gain is an ability to capitalize on the ideas I have during the other 95%, by more effectively fixing on them during non-walk time.

Is that the same thing as “getting rid of negative thoughts and mental static”? Doesn’t sound like it to me. If this is meant to be the same thing, I’d like to hear an explanation of how they are the same.

What the post described, in any case, was getting rid, not of “negative thoughts and mental static”, but of creative thoughts, idea generation, etc.—just about the diametric opposite of “mental static”.

Meta: I am getting rather tired of the following style of discourse:

Person A: [says something inscrutable or bizarre]

Person B: You seem to be saying [inscrutable or bizarre thing], which seems inscrutable, and/or bizarre! What gives?!

Person A: Are you sure that’s what I’m saying? [raises eyebrows suggestively, doesn’t actually elaborate or explain further]

Now, there are some people who have such a long, excellent, and public track record of being insightful, intelligent, and clear-headed that when they say something seemingly inscrutable or bizarre, I think twice before I conclude that the fault is with the idea or the explanation of it, rather than with my ability to comprehend it. There are very, very few such people. If you’re wondering whether you are one of them—you’re not.

So please, folks, drop the mysterious inscrutability act. If you write something and people on Less Wrong—people who are clearly not dumb, who’ve been exposed to the ideas of the rationality meme-sphere (have read the Sequences, etc.), and are generally not “Joe off the street”—don’t get what the heck you’re talking about, then the fault is with you. Write more clearly. If someone asks for an explanation, explain. Otherwise, what was the point of writing the thing in the first place? Are you trying to communicate, or aren’t you?

Quite simply, because it seems to me very much like an equivocation is taking place, on the meaning of ‘focus’.

Consider:

After a few weeks of this exercise, it will feel like you’ve built a new muscle in your head, one which allows you to turn away from your inner thoughts at will. Let’s call it focus.

Isn’t this a strange thing to say? Why would we call this thing ‘focus’? The word ‘focus’ already has a common usage, one with which we’re all familiar. And now we’re being asked to refer to a brand-new concept by the term?

So, at best, this is an unfortunate word usage. In such a case, what we have is one word, ‘focus’, that has gained an additional referent (if we were writing a dictionary, we’d need to include one more entry for the meaning of ‘focus’ than before). This new ‘focus’ has basically nothing to do with the thing that most people refer to by the commonplace word ‘focus’ (much like a point of a conic at which rays reflected from a curve or surface converge is one thing, and the concentration of attention is another thing, and the indicator of the currently active element in a user interface is a third thing [wiktionary]).

In this case, “the ability to focus” has no obvious value. The claim that it has some value has to be made explicitly, and defended on its own merits. Since this ‘focus’ is a totally new phenomenon, which we’re encountering for the first time, and which is not identical to any of the things which we have previously referred to by the word ‘focus’, we have no particular reason to expect that being able to do this new ‘focusing’ thing is good, or bad, or anything.

But there’s another possibility: that the choice of the word ‘focus’ is deliberate, and is meant, essentially, to serve as a motte-and-bailey. The motte, of course, is just the quoted part of the OP—the claim that “here is a new thing; we’ll call it, oh, let’s say ‘focus’, why not”. The bailey—unstated, but implied (and implied clearly enough that you, for instance, got exactly this meaning from the post)—is that this new thing that we’ve decided to call ‘focus’ is actually the same thing as one of the other things that we have previously called ‘focus’ (and it’s obvious which referent of the word we’re meant to identify this new phenomenon with—it’s not the one about the conic sections, that’s for sure!).

And if that is the implied meaning… then I call shenanigans. If the OP wishes to make the claim that this “new muscle in your head, one which allows you to turn away from your inner thoughts at will” is in fact the same sort of ‘focus’ as the one that lets me (for instance) write a term paper for 6 hours straight without getting distracted by Reddit, or play certain sorts of concentration-requiring games more effectively, or more easily spot mistakes when editing a short story, or do any of the other things that are improved by that which we commonly refer to as ‘focus’—then let him make that claim explicitly. (And it would be one heck of a claim! Huge, as they say, if true.)

not associated with enlightenment Enlightenment states are tricky to communicate about. mainly because they don't come from using words to point at them. I can't "prove" I was there. All I have is my confidence.

You can try to interpret my experience to fit your narrative or you could take what I say at face value.

You may not like calmness in the face of stresses and calmness in the face of everything - once you have it. It would be a shame to have spent so long "getting there" (depending on your method) only to be disappointed. (There's a joke here about Taoism too, if you successfully get the joke you might already be enlightened)