Meditation and enlightenment
Fundamental well-being, nondual medidation, non-symbolic experience, samadhi, socially-approved zoning out, YOL∞
January 5, 2016 — September 5, 2024
Meditation. Feels like it might do something useful. Not quite as hip as LSD microdosing but much cheaper.
Questions: Can it help with life? With productivity? How much of it do you need to actually help? What kind?
1 Popular canned gurus
No time to commute to tiny Himalayan mountain monasteries? Here, have some smartphone-mediated mindfulness.
2 Biofeedback
Curious about empirical verification of benefits of EEG-type feedback. Certainly the hardware is getting affordable-ish.
3 Enlightenment
Jeffrey Martin and his famous “60% chance of enlightenment in 6 week with one hour/per day” school
How is enlightenment different from Cotard’s syndrome? Is it simply that one does not enjoy Cotard’s syndrome, but enlightment is pretty nice.?
4 Retreats
- Sortawee Vipassana in Chachoensao has been recommended to me
5 Connection to canalization
Maybe the opposite of canalization? See Canalization.
6 Incoming
Gwern, 2013 Lewis meditation results:
A small group of Quantified Selfers tested themselves daily on arithmetic and engaged in a month of meditation. I analyze their scores with a multilevel model with per-subject grouping, and find the expected result: a small decrease in arithmetic errors which is not statistically-significant, with practice & time-of-day effects (but not day-of-week or weekend effects). This suggests a longer experiment by twice as many experimenters in order to detect this effect.
Scott Alexander reviews a bunch of books and theories. e.g. The Mind Illuminated, Mastering the core teachings of the Buddha, and seems to come out saying… words.
Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem is his attempt to put this in the context of predictive coding.