Posted by jger15 9/4/2025
In Hebrew you "place [your] heart" (lasim lev).
In Korean 신경 쓰다 literally means "to use nerves." The idea of investing mental energy into something
In Finnish, you fasten or attach attention (kiinnittaa huomiota)
In French (correct me if I’m wrong) you “make” attention, « faire attention ». Like there’s unlimited amount of attention and you can always make more.
Edit: "to pay attention" is literally "Aufmerksamkeit zollen"
Sure, just like you can't separate "pay attention". Both are idiomatic. But you can separate "aufpassen" into "Paß auf". (For the benefit of non-German lurkers, "Paß auf" is a command to pay attention.)
The literal analogue to "pass on" or "fit on" is "anpassen"; "auf" generally means "over", "on/to the top of".
Which phrase would this be?
But ”have” attention exists for both of those as well. ”Ha fokus”.
I can get psychdelic vision at will being sober (OEVs), mainly looking at grass (with other images it's more difficult). It's produced by sustained attention. It doesn't come with any other psychdelic effect, so it doesn't seem too valuable.
I agree I would have loved more of a hard / concrete definition oriented approach to the whole piece but everything they were saying really resonated at least in terms of my personal experience. I haven't ever come across a writer focusing on this. It was really unexpected / refreshing. It's already is reshaping little moments in my day like hugging my son just now. Very unexpected transcendental value for an HN skim while ignoring a boring zoom standup. The truth is out there.
Personal computing and the growth of the internet are an example of something looping. They reinforce and amplify each other's impact and value.
What it means is understood by looking at its converse - panic attack. Wherein, anxiety stirs some negative thoughts which stirs even more anxiety which stirs more negativity and so on until the system seizes - or that has been my understanding of it.
Here, positivity feeds joy which feeds more positivity etc..
You could drop acid and take a walk on the beach and see the ocean that way and feel those things and cry about it. You could get stoned and put on your favorite album and slip into a vivid daydream, directed by the music as a soundtrack.
I agree with the author that intense focus can make something more mundane feel special, like intensely focusing on the act of eating an apple, but being moved by walking on a beautiful beach in the evening seems almost expected?
I did do mushrooms frequently at a young age (like a couple times a month from 16-18) so maybe that tweaked something in my brain, but I feel like I slip in "Jhana" all the goddamn time haha. I was tearing up staring at the trees blowing outside while waiting for my dentist a couple days ago.
I don't think I've ever gotten a panic attack from paying attention to anxiety.
Sometimes I started feeling anxious first and then retroactively assigned the topic to it.
In the case that I am ruminating over something that does actually worry me, I can get into a spiral of reinforcing thoughts that increase my anxiety.
Paying attention to the feeling, not the thoughts, lets me break the spiral and attempt to free my thoughts. The feeling can linger for some time though, given its a chemical process to flush it all out from the body. During that period it's more likely I might end up thinking about the topic again so it's precarious still.
Which definitely doesn't help the anxiety.
> The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator.
She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana."
It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry.
Again, this isn't saying that Buddhist modernism is bad. I'd argue that having clear eyes about what parts of Buddhist practice you're willing to take and leave is good.
Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong.
> I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities
You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism.
My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
Our behaviors are determined by habit far more than anything, willpower is seldom enough to result in behavioral patterns over time. Even things like the career we chose become habit; pivoting from technology to horticulture will not happen if you cannot change your daily habits to go from thinking about technology to thinking about horticulture.
Sports understand overtraining. It even means much the same as in AI circles.
The trick isn’t avoiding measurement. The trick is staggering out use if any measurement. Today we are working on speed drills. Tomorrow we work on form. Ans in a couple days we work on endurance. Nobody but software developers are trying to work on their sprinting every goddamned day.
We are the insane ones.