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What have you tried?
In my experience, meditation works wonders to improve focus. Some people might recommend exercise as a way to improve energy. (Meditation and exercise also takes time, of course.)
Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
Hm. This might be a valid point. Thanks.
Huh. This is an interesting read. Your mind seems to work in a very different way than mine.
Have you read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? I have not read the whole thing, but I have read summaries of it, and your description reminds me of it. :)
Do you do painful things with no reward in the near future?
For example, do you exercise even if you don't want to? (Here I am assuming that you hate exercise like I do. If you enjoy exercise, this question is not really relevant.)
Do you refrain from eating tasty but unhealthy food?
If so, how do you motivate yourself?
Thanks for the links. I will look at those.
You seem to be one of the relatively few people who have some understanding of my problem.
Demotivation is only a problem when it comes to tasks that I do not want to do - typically because there is a great delay between the action and the reward. It is easy to motivate myself to eat breakfast because it is an easy task with a swift reward. It is much harder to motivate myself to exercise, for example, because it is a painful task with no reward in the near future.
"I" control my choices in a sense, but this "I" is deterministic.
And I am not making any particular distinction between small and large events. Suppose I am hesitating over whether or not to eat a piece of cake. One part of me wants the cake; another part of me wants to skip the cake for the sake of my future health.
The part of me that wants the cake will use this argument: "Eat the cake. In the end, it's predetermined whether you're going to eat the cake or not. So you might as well take the path of least resistance. Why struggle and go through hardship? You'll always end up doing the one and only thing you can do anyway. If you ingest more sugar than what would be optimal, then it's because you were always predetermined to ingest that sugar. Do what feels nice."
I find this hard to refute.
In the end, it comes down to being able to train yourself to purposefully pick and choose the aspects of life you choose to judge with fierce rationality and the aspects in which you allow a little leeway... or maybe just tweaking your definition of rationality as a whole to maximize long-term happiness.
Can you say something about how you did this?
A practical exercise I like is asking "If I had to bring myself to face the most 'makes me feel bad about myself' cause of my demotivation, what would it be?".
Could you please explain that again? This sounds like it could be useful, but I don't completely understand it.
I don't agree that the solution to it is to shut up and go practice more. Or rather, it may help the individual who makes that choice, but it doesn’t help the community in general. It just means that in the absence of that one person, the other people will shift their philosophizing to other topics.
A good example of evaporative cooling. :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs
The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
General Relativity makes testable predictions. Conversely, whenever I hear descriptions of "nonduality", it is not at all clear that these claims make any predictions at all. Most statements I have heard about nonduality seem like non-statements with no ramifications. But I might be wrong.
You do bring up one example of a potentially testable prediction of nonduality:
A consequence of the statement "we are all One" is that we should be able to experience this unity. If there exist people who experience this as a reality (and not just as an altered state,) they should be able to detect the thoughts and feelings of others around them.
Why merely "others around them"? If "we are all One", I would think it should also be possible to detect the thoughts and feelings of people on the other side of the Earth.
> The truths of General Relativity cannot be conveyed in conventional language. But does one have to study the underlying mathematics before evaluating its claims?
Yes. Of course you do.
I was surprised to hear this from you. In other threads you have seemed rather quick to dismiss mystical claims without trying to master the underlying "language".
Neat! Could you elaborate on what the person in question "used" the idea of the Trinity for?
Your link has since rotted. But I found this other article which also paraphrases Batchelor's paraphrase of the parable: https://thebuddhistcentre.com/westernbuddhistreview/does-it-float-stephen-batchelors-secular-buddhism
It references Batchelor's book Secular Buddhism.
Because that was not the purpose of my post. I did not mean to invite people to "cast a quick glance at the occult community and come up with an explanation". I was fishing for people who already knew something about the topic.
If they are trying to sell something - authors, bloggers, influencers - then I agree that this is a major concern.
When it's just people posting on social media, I don't expect there to be that many overt liars. Although self-deception is very much a possibility.
Very good points! Thanks.
Did you ever write that post? :)
Thanks.
As for a community, have you tried r/StreamEntry on Reddit? There might be some. I don't know. I am no Finder.
Thanks! Apparently his first name is spelled Jeffery.
Interesting! Have you written about this experience - i.e., where concentration practices stopped working? (If it's something personal I won't pry, but if you've written about it before I am very curious to read it.)
Which book is that? I tried to search and found several authors with that name and variants of it.
This response makes it sound as though you are trying to win a fight rather than interested in understanding something.
ask them if they think that's really fair given everyone else is paying $20. What makes them different/special such that they should only pay $5?
This might be effective social pressure, but it doesn't seem particularly rational. If someone else volunteers to pay you more than they need - and more than YOU need - then why should that obligate me to do the same?
What article or book is that quote from?
What is your sample size here? How many "enlightened" people have you examined for cognitive bias?
This was a great post!
You included some speculation about the stages of TMI. May I ask you what stage of TMI you were in at the time when you wrote this? (If you've been doing enough TMI practice that the question makes sense.)
And in case you've mastered more of the stages since the time you wrote this, do you still believe your speculation in this article was correct?
Expert meditators have been known to sometimes ignore extreme physical pain that should have caused them to seek medical aid. And they probably would have sought help, if not for their ability to drop their resistance to pain and experience it with extreme equanimity.
Interesting. Can you cite any examples of this?
In her book "Get Off Your Cushion", Li-Anne Tang cites one anecdote with Culadasa a year before his death where he did something like this. But that's the only example I know of.
Outside view: data suggests that conscientiousness is the least impacted of the big 5 by meditation (neither up nor down).
Interesting! Can you recommend me any good reading about how meditation interacts with the Big 5 personality traits?
I hope you are still reading replies here. 🙂
This was a very thought-provoking post. But I don't fully understand what you are trying to say.
You say that Buddhist meditation developed in a context of severe inequality and poverty - which are obviously not good things. Then you say that Buddhist meditation should not be divorced from its cultural context. I did not understand exactly what context you believe we need to preserve. Could you please elaborate on that?
As far as I understand, "the (mistaken) belief in a permanent self or soul" is one of the Ten Fetters that one must break free of in order to achieve the stages of enlightenment.
On the other hand, the woman who fought back against the alien might also be less submissive to the man that reclaims her. That may be a virtue or a flaw depending on what he values in women.
And they use the term "Asia" but talk about people from China.
What does "Asia" refer to here? As far as I can see your excerpts mention only one country in Asia, namely China. Do these findings about "Asia" apply only to China (and countries culturally related to China, such as Japan)? Or do some of them also apply to other countries in Asia such as India?
Similarly, does "the West" mean specifically "the United States of America", or were any other Western countries considered?
There are other agents in the population than humans.
(I apologize for the late reply. I didn't check my notifications.)
There is one aspect which you almost completely ignore in your post and which I believe is vital: WHY is stagnation bad? WHY is progress good? You make it sound as though you just want fancy gadgets for the sake of having fancy gadgets.
You have a "quantitative" section, but what exactly are you trying to quantify? Why is economic growth good?
You should spend more time pondering: What (quantifiable) factors are valuable in and of themselves? And have these factors improved or stagnated?
For example, I believe there is less famine and fewer people living in extreme poverty worldwide. Lifespans may have stagnated in the developed world, but how about in the developing world? If poor people are less poor and live longer, that is extremely important progress. They need the progress way more than we do.
Conversely, climate change and other looming environmental disasters may make poverty and suffering skyrocket again and make the world a much worse place, even if our gadgets grow ever fancier.
I don't see why there would be more demand and less supply of labour after such a catastrophe. Why do you think that? (Or was it a joke? I cannot tell.)
I would rather say that the bright side is that a societal collapse brought on by a pandemic might at least delay the climate change collapse a bit.
The "utility monster" has ceased to be a utility monster because it no longer gets everything.
Can this be resolved by adding more monsters? I.e., instead of having just one utility monster on Earth, we could have a million or even 6 billion monsters (as many as there are humans). This would allow the monsters to fully benefit from consuming "everything" or at least close enough to "everything" to raise the dilemma.
I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it's an Industrial Age blind spot.
I think "most people in time and space" have lived in the industrial age. Am I wrong?