Meditation

My attempt to create a resource about meditation that is: mind-blowing, no-nonsense, easy to grasp, and actionable.

Nov 18, 2023

Access this continuously evolving resource on my wiki.

Why I am doing it?

These are effects I observed after doing a couple of weeks of meditation. They probably start after like 2-3 weeks 10min a day.

Lowering anxiety
(various types of anxieties, both mild and deep-seated ones)
Enhancing clarity during complex, multi-faceted problem-solving
(e.g. it's making me a better designer, it’s helping me with difficult decisions)
Cultivating feelings of peace, harmony, and acceptance
(I feel more at peace; it instills a sense of correctness, grounds me in the present, and quiets the default part of homo-sapiens brain fixated on the next thing or seeking more)
Increasing patience and reducing the lure of immediate gratification
(For example, I find myself less drawn to minor addictions like social media or casual snacking)
Enhancing focus

How to meditate?

Take two states of mind: being here and now and being immersed in thought.

Close your eyes and focus on experiencing the here and now. What are the sounds? How are the sensations of your body? How does your own consciousness feel? How a cloud of sensations like emotions feels like? Focus on any input present input. There is no way of doing it wrong.
Naturally, thoughts will come and take you away in the abstract space of no-time and no-place.
Your task is to discover that you are consumed by thoughts and come back to here and now. Be kind to yourself. Everybody fails that. Accept that you will be failing it too and keep coming back.

(In order to feel any effects commit to 10min a day for two-three weeks)

Or just play my fav guided meditations:

My fav guided meditation

Smile by Tara Brach (26 min) I am guesstimating I did that one 150 times in my life

Other I like: Calling on Your Awakened Heart by (24 min) Tara Brach

Framework to try meditation

Evaluating meditation: 20 days x 15 min

It's weirdly hard to appreciate meditation. A big part of me is convinced about its gains, another can easily skip it. I still find parts of myself confused: what might this not-doing offer that doing does not?

I also think gains from meditation are visible after two-three weeks of sustained practice.

Steps 1 and 3 are optional, but I believe including them is beneficial as they offer a comparison between two states, helping to counteract flawed memory, My-side bias and Confirmation bias

On day one, write a short self-evaluation (or just record a voice memo). Ask yourself where anxiety is in your life and what its intensity? How do you score on areas such as: focus, peace, experiencing a state of flow, self-wisdom (feeling internally wise and being on the right direction in your life)? You may also include a stream of consciousness on states from the last week.
For 20 days do at least 15 minutes of meditation every day. (You don't need to know more than: Sit and try to stay in the present moment as much as possible. Know that everybody fails at not-thinking. When you notice that you are thinking just come back to the present moment)
On the day 20th take ten minutes and repeat the evaluation and compare the notes.

So far I did two tests like this and saw clear gains described in “Why I am doing it” chapter above. I recommend 20 min sessions, but I also think 10 min sessions will be good. For people without previous meditation practice 20-min sessions may be too long to go through.

How to think about meditation?

“The advantage of meditation is not that you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state, it’s that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is.” – Naval Ravikant
I think most of the people who never meditated have this impression that they are in control of their thoughts. During meditation, you witness how hard it is to stay here and now and that thoughts come up on their own.
“Staying for a minute without getting distracted is a heroic feat. The longer you meditate the easier it is to recognize this "torrent of discursivity" which is preventing you from staying focused.” – Sam Harris
“You can uncover that consciousness itself has intrinsic quality of wellbeing. Simply paying attention to the experience is the antidote to the feeling of dissatisfaction. That what is aware of sadness isn’t truly sad.” – Sam Harris
“All of humanity's problems stem from men's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal
“Meditation as a calibration chamber to avoid instant gratification urges. If one is able to be “bored for 20 min” one is more resilient in the face of any form of addiction: food, social media, substances etc.”
“Meditation may reduce suffering via defusing state of “cognitive fusion”. Cognitive fusion happens when individuals perceive their thoughts and emotions as objective realities. This fusion can lead to suffering, as individuals perceive thoughts as them and become trapped in their narratives.” – Kaj Sotala via My attempt to explain Looking, insight meditation, and enlightenment in non-mysterious terms
My take: Most suffering occurs in anticipation, like the anxiety felt before a doctor's visit for a vaccine. It's often a projection of an imagined future state. Meditation helps bring awareness to the present, countering these projections by diffusing the mental blending of thoughts and reality, known as "cognitive fusion."
Direct forms of suffering, like immediate physical or emotional pain, can also be mitigated through meditation. By intently focusing on the raw sensation of the pain, it transforms into a vibration, devoid of a subject. It reveals that: “That what is aware of suffering does not suffer.
On a psychedelic like states that are accessible for very experienced meditators:
“If you would spend 18 hours a day meditating for a month. At the end of the month you will be noticing this white noise, this torrent of discursivity that is preventing you from staying on breath for a minute. And staying for a minute without getting distracted is a heroic feat. If you could pay attention to anything without being lost in thought for a minute at a time there would be neurophysiological correlates that are very drug like. There is immense pleasure that people get from being concentrated. There is bliss, rapture. Feeling of expansiveness in the mind, where your body disappears and consciousness feel like a vast void. And a only thing that appears might be the thing you were paying attention to. And even that might disappear and there is nothing but pure consciousness – an extraordinarily pleasurable psychedelic like experience. If you were actually concentrated as you imagine your self to be that would be very accessible to you.” – Sam Harris in conversation with Adam Grant (1:02:08)
Nick Cammarata has an incredible tweeter feed where he talks about Dharma, Jhana and meditation
“Jhana is extatic meditative state that’s different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over … Best comparable I have for jhana is sex (many people compare these) bc they're surprisingly similar. Jhana killed my desire for casual sex bc it's 10-100x better … jhana made me not crave pleasure so much anymore. Cured that "addiction" via surplus. … the best analogy I have is if you're extremely thirsty you'd do anything for water but if you're barely thirsty it's kind of just nice and helpful. And you certainly wouldn't break a bone for it. Pre jhana I was always "thirsty" for feeling good, now I'm a lot less so.” – via Nick Cammarata On Jhana by Scott Alexander
This particular twitter thread is one of the most exciting intro to meditation.
“Let's talk about the hilariously insane power of attention. Attention was where evolution accidentally messed up and made us extremely overpowered. It doesn't want us being easily happy, and if it could redo it it would nerf us, but it can't.
Attention like a flashlight. For most people it's an extremely broad and dim flashlight, kind of lighting everything. It also moves around and things tug at it all day and you don't really have control and you definitely can't just drop it on something and leave it there
If you're aware of something you're giving it some attention. If your attention were fine enough, as you move it around everything else would go away completely. If you attend strongly to your breath but not your body your body is gone. You're just a nose
With practice your flashlight gets much much better. It can get so good that nothing tugs at it. You can just drop it on whatever you want and not move it for 10 minutes and nothing is tugging at you to move. It's just there and that's all you care about right now
The way to get better at this is to practice returning your attention to one thing over and over again. It shouldn't feel like a struggle. Just lightly return it back. Your breath works, or metta, which is returning to the feeling of loving-kindness. It should feel good
I've been meditating regularly since ~2013 and I started with completely wasting about 500 hours on forcing myself as hard as I could to focus on my breath. Don't be like me, "concentration meditation" is a bad word bc it sounds forceful. Let it drift back to your object
Okay fast forward a bit and you're able to control your meditation pretty well. What do you get, what's the prize?
It builds up "samadhi" and first thing you notice is more beauty and meaning in everything, like seeing with glasses after a life of bad eyes. You can just fully do something. The world becomes shockingly gorgeous, kind of like 2cb if you've done that. It's just really nice …
Now that you have a strong flashlight, you can decide what you want to feel by attending to it.
It turns out if you attend fully to something, even if its small, it's all you feel, and you feel it extremely potently
So once you've build up enough samadhi you can feel whatever you want. Just find a tiny bit of it in your awareness, a tiny dot of joy near your hand, or smile a little to create a microburst of happiness. Then attend to it 100%
Your everything, your entire awareness of the universe will become happy. There's no more you, no more world, nothing. Just happy. This happy makes the tiny happy spot a bit stronger, making it easier to attend to, making it a bit stronger, etc until it explodes.”
Lastly on some of the effects of these states:
“a lot of days now I'm playing with piti and sukha while I do other things just adjusting to them to what I feel like, what my body needs right now and trying to think about how I can support it.”
The end goal is to have a meditative state in life
Read more on entering "meditative" states in daily activities:
“I’m trying to turn off my monkey mind. I think, when we’re born as children, we’re pretty blank slates. We’re living very much in the moment. We’re essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts. We’re living in, what I would call the “real world.” When puberty comes along, that’s the onset of desire, it’s the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning for it. Because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.
This is all normal and healthy. It’s part of being the human animal. I think at some point it gets out of control and then we are constantly talking to ourselves in our head. We’re playing little movies in our heads, walking down the street, but no one’s actually there. Of course, if we started voicing this thought in your head that you’re always having, you’d be a madman and they’d lock you up.
The reality is if you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything that they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality.
That could be good when you’re doing long-range planning. It can be good when you’re solving problems. It’s good for the survival and replication machines that we are. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. In my mind, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. It’s not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24/7.
I’ve taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. If I say to you, “Don’t think of a pink elephant”, I just put a pink elephant in your head. It’s an almost impossible problem. It’s more something that has to be guided by feel, than guided by actual thinking or thought process. I’m deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities, that will help me get out of my mind.
All of society does that to some extent. In some sense, the people chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head. They’re trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present every day and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would.”
– Naval Ravikant on Shane Parrish Podcast (start 20:51) Link
Scott Alexander’s guess that meditation may help with Bias correction:
If you want to get out of a trapped prior, is … A final possibility is other practices and lifestyle changes that cause the brain to increase the weight of experience relative to priors. Meditation probably does this; see the discussion in the van der Bergh post for more detail.
Naval Ravikant ‘s approach:
“What it really is, is the art of doing nothing. All you do for meditation is sit down, close your eyes. Whatever happens, happens. If you think – think. If you don't think – don't think. Don't put effort into it. Don't put effort against it ... Every meditation technique is leading you to the same thing which is witnessing. And concentration is a technique to steal your mind enough so you can then drop the object of concentration. So you could also just try going straight to the endgame ... Happiness comes from peace. Peace comes from indifference. Indifference is the ultimate super power – this works in negotiation, relationships, and business opportunities. The place that I want to end up the most is just peace. Peace to me is happiness at rest ... The way we think we get peace is resolving all the external problems. There are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get piece is on the inside – by giving up this idea of problems.” – via Naval Ravikant on Joe Rogan's Show Listen on YouTube 1:19:50

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