I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.
And I agree, not letting your mind do this from time to time results in higher stress and less ability to focus.
I'll butcher his insightful phrasing, but he remarks to the effect of
> I think I'm going to stop blogging. The act of sitting at a laptop and writing these posts seems incompatible with my life as it exists on a book tour. The only free moments available for it to occupy would be ones where I'm sitting, momentarily caught between two scheduled activities and staring off into space. I have a suspicion these moments are crucial for my soul. So, until we meet again.
The comingled ambiguousness and specificity of the observation stuck with me.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20070123212506/http://www.willia...
I'm addicted to reading, I take my kindle and phone everywhere, so will grab them when I'm walking, taking a shower, waiting in line, going to the restroom... Between my kindle and my phone, I read a lot more books than I ever did but I don't digest the information as much as I used to. I also don't make as much associations between what I read and things going on in my own life. So, in a way, despite reading a lot more, I don't think I benefit as much from it.
Now, I'm purposefully forcing myself not to reach to my kindle when taking a walk so that my mind can wander as much as I do.
I also attached a laptop to a treadmill at home, but the static electricity from the rubber mat kept zapping the laptop.
The best result was a laptop on an exercise bike. But the bike couldn't have a high resistance or I would lose concentration.
I read "Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" recently and since reading that I make an effort to not pick up my phone as much. I'd recommend reading the book, if you're looking for something to do instead of doomscrolling.
That's the same with smartphones and those scrolling apps, they make it fun to do nothing and be bored.
I can't find the motivation to do anything at the moment. But if reddit or facebook get opened up i'll just scroll. It's almost like i've replace doing things with watching other people do things and that somehow makes me less likely to work on my hobbies because i'm not as good or far along.
AI has added to this, almost like, why bother bettering myself when I could probably shit out my idea in a handful of prompts? I need a dopamine fast or something. Might try staring at a wall
Anyway, the article I'm thinking of was about a guy who had advice along the lines of "keeping up your hygiene" or "maintaining your cleanliness habits" and his anecdote was about being stuck for a while in making progress on a problem, but he would have a habit of taking a daily shower. There was a detail he shared about getting an insight and then being able to write some ideas on the window with the condensation.
I wonder if I can find it again.
(@stevenkaas on twitter).
> I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in
> And stops my mind from wandering
> Where it will go
"All I can do is read a book to stay awake And it rips my mind away but it's a great escape." - Blind Melon
Newspapers are probably an intermediate between those two, to various degrees depending on the specific newspaper (trash vs deeper analysis).
I mean, just shut your phone off. You're likely just missing text messages anyway.
And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.
Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.
This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.
As far as "inventing". I know what you (@reg_dunlop) mean but I don't see too much real harm. My father was into a book that talked about "not thinking". It was just a re-framing of part of mindfulness. If it helps... I'm not going to fuss about it.
As far as eyes. I was taught to not close my eyes completely but most of the way. I saw a documentary that explored Tibetan monks and their meditation. From what I recall, one of the monks said to use the eyelids as adjustable window blinds(or a valve... I'm paraphrasing to my understanding of what he was saying) so that if they got a bit sleepy they would open them more.
Personally, I'm a big believer in mindfulness but I do have some questions on some finer points. I might even aspire to teach it, but need further help myself first. Let me know of any resources that helped you (anyone)
i get the scare quote usage. but still feel like it’s a good time to point out.
there’s no right zazen. there’s no wrong zazen. there’s just zazen. sitting down and taking what comes. that’s all we’re doing. sitting down and getting quieter.
emphasis on the -er in quieter.
30 minutes of “crap” zazen is probably the most rewarding zazen. i just don’t appreciate it at the time.
something that helped me recently is just giving myself a day off. it’s okay. i’ll come back to it. as someone said to me recently — the worst way of maintaining a practice is to force it / control it.
i often end up crying during zazen. i’ve done it for a couple of years. i was never really sure why. it was just a thing. i cried for 5 mins after about 20 mins and then just got back on with the last 5 mins.
i (eventually) sat with an online group and they talked after sitting once about how zazen and zen aren’t there to deal with mental health issues. that’s what doctors, therapy etc are for. i had been definitely trying to “fix” some stuff that can’t be fixed through the practice for a while there.
this is why having a group or a teacher to practice with is important. i can get stuck in believing my own “crap” because i can’t see outside my own “crap”.
then again, sometimes “crap” zazen is just “crap” zazen. but having a group or a teacher helps with it — at least you’ll know you’re not the only one struggling! xD
For me it was "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa. A meditation textbook which tells us what to practice, how to practice and why. Especially useful if you need the finer points.
I'm reluctant to say more about my own mindfulness practice; I feel the finer points about how or when to meditate are open to interpretation. Anyone can be as superficial or dogmatic as they'd like when it comes to choosing a practice, and how they adhere to it.
The point, for me, isn't strict adherence; It's both simpler and more interesting to let go of the preconceived notions of attempting to achieve something.
One thing I will say: If I believe I can't meditate for 5 minutes, I meditate for 15. This makes me more open and receptive in life when I find myself saying "....I should meditate".
You are something beyond all this. Try find it.
By going through the mind goes in a trance unable to think any thoughts. I find it better approach compared to try to disciplining the mind.
Usually that's an eye opener.
I should pick up practice again. I feel very lucky having discovered Vipassana meditation when I was 19 and having had some great teachers throughout my twenties. It helped me accept parts of my youth that were not great or safe. In hindsight, going to a psychologist would have been a good addition, but that never occurred to early to mid 20s me, but in lieu of that Vipassa helped me a lot.
As for the article, I am actually doing 1 - 2 min shikantaza regularly while working. I'm staring at an empty screen. I do it multiple times per hour regardless if I feel focused or not.
* Don't try to fix the posture while attempting shikantaza.
** Obviously something even more practical for a beginner is to gain focus by counting breaths and then breath awareness, before trying the most difficult type of zazen. I'm just describing what would be a way for someone that does not practice to imagine what correct shikantaza feels like.
It could be, but it depends on what you're cultivating. If you're spaced out, day dreaming, then you're practicing distraction. Meditation is practicing the opposite of distraction, to become aware of the mind's true state.
In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness, by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena.
True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
> True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
There are different forms of meditation and the one with the most evidence is also the easiest to do, mindfulness [1].
Very little intent is needed to get the majority of the benefits from meditation. I don't know that zen meditation offers more benefits, perhaps it does. But I do know that the "fake" forms of meditation are still beneficial.
Specifically I would say the concepts of “striving” and “intent” aren’t ones I would use.
What it actually is takes a little more to pin down (famously) but I would consider the concept of surrender to be more applicable. In fact I would say the absence of striving would be a good sign you’re on the right track.
I would consider staring at a wall without intent to be completely compatible with Zen practice.
they definitely were not describing soto-zen tho, that’s for sure.
edit — i find it almost koan-esque that there’s two schools referred to as “zen”, both of which generally dislike the label “zen”, both of which have very different practices and methods.
I have heard of zen described as 'just sit down and shut up' and stare at a wall. With no goal, no purpose.
The Zen approach, more than any other, seems to precisely emphasize the purity of 'sit down and shut up'. Shikantaza - literally means 'simply sitting'. It fundamentally involves no staring at walls, no koan to grasp and struggle over, even following your breath is not really a part of it... It really, really is 'just' sitting, in every systemic sense. A practice which has no clear goal or intent, instead focused on removing anything that could act as such, act as any tether over awareness. Awareness untethered, unbounded, past distinction.
Lao Tzu comes to mind... he said it much more succinctly: Wei - Wu Wei (do - not doing). The action of effortlessly being adrift with the flow, the action of surrender of your 'self' and the infinite schemes/designs/narratives that it builds (as someone in the discussion above here aptly suggested). Another quote comes to mind from elsewhere: 'Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind.'
This seems counterintuitive. Maybe I'm doing it wrong but in my newbie practice it seems to be like resistance or cardiovascular training where there is effort in the moment and a sense of one's limits and a sense of unfolding and gains toward more depth and weight and duration. Like the gym it can be disappointing to lose ground after a break but there is also the contentment of regaining strength similar to rereading a familiar book and seeing it in new light.
There have been times that required more purposeful scheduling and preparation that is my default mode and times when whatever was in my head made me just actively hate sitting there and fail to realize that sensation as an ephemeral state. I accepted the door was closed that day and came back the next to pick up at the stopping point.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to understand how training attention in this manner can provoke dramatic improvements in attitude, happiness, and even conventional life goals. This is where a lot of the work in modern Buddhism is being done, and I personally believe we need to integrate these techniques into our everyday systems and ways of living. Otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss them since good, objective evidence of their efficacy is hard to come by.
Perhaps a useful framing for readers on here is in reprogramming your self. We often accept that we cannot change or even that we want to change. By training our attention, we can focus it on the way the mind itself functions, and this eventually gives us the power to rewrite or rework core parts of our selves. The body contains the source code to our perception of reality, and when we can truly let go we find that we are free to be the person we want, and it is in fact our destiny.
I think your parallel is spot on!
I remember sitting in an intro session and the teacher asked everyone for what they expected - one of the guys there was a dude bro who was obviously there because his girlfriend dragged him. He said all the fancy things about reaching higher consciousness, like he thought the whole thing was stupid but he was playing along. Then after sitting for 15 minutes he was more into it than his GF. He clearly had an experience and excitedly struggled to find the words to describe it. I honestly think the less you expect out of sitting, the more likely you are to get something, weirdly.
In the first regime the time goes somewhat quickly and it isn’t as difficult. I call this the zoning out regime. There usually hits a sudden point where zoning out is no longer quite as easy. This is probably the meditative regime where I have to be more mindful about keeping my mind blank.
I set a timer just to train my will, but I don’t prioritize spending a ton of time in that second regime. Just anecdotally, once I’m past the zoning out regime my focus is usually back.
I feel like staring at walls is similar.
This is common. A true meditation practice brings up a lot of stuff, from general body aches and pains to deep emotional things you may be unconsciously suppressing. With time and persistence, and with the right teacher, it becomes liberating though.
I just end up feeling emotionally "flat" after doing it. Which sometimes feels like that's the goal, but I don't like the feeling
[1] https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Two_extremes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 and particularly as formulated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajnaparamita
[3] for example Saraha: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraha and Tilopa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilopa
There's one where you are at rest and slowly shift the focus of your gaze from near to middle distance to far away, and back.
It's supposed to be a grounding exercise to bring your mind back to a state of rest and just observing.
This is almost exactly like Transcendental Meditation, even down the to the length of time of ~20 minutes.
You are correct, in just 4 hours.
Interesting twist- notice dark shapes in your color spectrum for a while, then switch to light. Trippy.
That might actually be true! But there are people who claim they cry, or experience infinite bliss, or that meditation gave them long lasting mental health problems and is dangerous. When I've emptied my mind and let the trees and houses fly past on train trips, I've neither cried nor experienced infinite bliss nor broken down mentally.
Choosing a brief walk can be exercise, or a brisk walk that's a little longer - maybe doing some forms of housework can be exercise. But exercise can also be running marathons, swimming laps, playing street hockey, dancing in your kitchen, skateboarding or messing around on the monkey bars. Those would all make you feel your body in various ways, both during and after the fact.
I do think your empty mind train rides can be meditation. The fact that much more intense or demanding forms of practice exists does not invalidate that.
(To belabour the metaphor a bit, regarding potential dangers - if somebody has a knee injury, some forms of exercise will be safer for them than others. Take care of yourself!)
Who cares if they're doing exercise or not? The person who takes walks presumably knows it's a form of exercise. They're not talking about the other forms, they may not be able to do Crossfit or go skiing, and they might not feel confident expressing opinions about the entirety of all exercise, but they definitely know that walking works for them.
I do somewhat see the value in promoting specific, accessible meditative practices without necessarily using the word meditation for it, simply because it can be needlessly intimidating and put some people off because they come carrying a number of assumptions.
Maybe that same principle does also apply to exercise - some people will do it by accident and have a good time, but still balk at idea of doing capital E Exercise as a distinct activity in itself. Sometimes it really is just a mindset thing.
It's more like the opposite. If you think about your breathing, you'll be "controlling" it (which funnily enough is not the case when you don't think about it). Meditation is the opposite: you have to be in a state where you can think about your breathing and yet you're not controlling it.
I can tell that, from doing it since a long time and from talking to people about it, even many people who practice meditation cannot reach that state (thinking about breathing without controlling it).
And you also really don't focus on body parts: you "disconnect" them all until you don't even feel them anymore.
And you also shouldn't focus on irrelevant things: you have to focus on absolutely nothing.
There are many different techniques to "pass on through to the other side": some visualize thoughts ("words" or the "internal monologue") as if it was a sea. The more thoughts, the more hectic the sea (and you want it all calm: no words, no internal monologue). Some imagine a lotus flower opening and when the last leaf opens, you can be in. Some imagine diving.
I meditate on and off since a long time. There are benefits, for example I definitely can lower the intensity of headaches (or at least how I perceive the pain). What I tell my friends is that Buddhist monks are actually on serious trips beating any psychedelic drug that does exist.
It's a great feeling to just stare at a wall and think.
My first thought is usually, "If I could think about anything right now, what would it be?" And this frees my mind up to think about what I want to think about.
Me too. And all I wanted was a Pepsi.
As a former heavy coffee consumer, I experienced varying degrees of tiredness over my workday, and inconsistent sleep patterns.
Ever since I stopped drinking it, my energy levels have been far more predictable and decrease rather linearly until bedtime. There is definitely no more "hitting the wall" in the early afternoon! Living caffeine free has generally been a considerable QOL improvement (after initial withdrawal).
Meditation is to mental training and focus, as going to the gym is to physical training.
Socials killed our attention span. Agents are literally making us context switch even more.
Putting aside the whole "I am at piece and one with the world" part of meditation, it is extremely hard.
I'm also no expert. When I'm waiting for something to finish (agent, compilation, etc), I've found that staring at a wall ends up in a net positive in productivity rather than replying to a message, going on X, or kicking off another agent.
But why not just go for a nice walk with no headphones?
I wish people didn't overuse certain terms. Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body. It can't possibly keep you up at night.
It's just the caffeine, which in turn has a half-life of several hours. Also below a certain level it's eliminated approximately exponentially, so there's a long tail of residual caffeine.
May be true.
But doing "rewarding" work encourages your body to emit more dopamine. Some people call it "the flow", others "hyperfocus", but it is a constant stream of dopamine that keeps you doing what you currently do. And you can interfere with the emittance and absorbtion by using caffeine.
I have never understood why people feel the need to use terms like "dopamine" in very pop culture and highly unscientific way, instead of just describing the state that they are talking about.
The other day someone told me that they "sense a high concentration of acetylcholine" in me. Thank you, I guess?
Personally, I blame Jordan Peterson. it's not that he used those terms incorrectly (he didn't). It's that the general public interpreted them in a way that went on to live a life of its own.
Fair enough if the use of “dopamine” is imprecise, but excessive screen time / doomscrolling / shitposting is definitely enough to wire you awake on its own, without caffeine.
That's for IV dopamine, used in extreme circumstances. Natural dopamine lasts shorter than that!
I could only keep peak thinking/designing/developing for about an hour or so. That's peak matrix level with edge cases identified and documented on the way.
I could do OK for a lot longer, but the same quality wasn't there.
The non-smokers would resent us for it, but most of them would go for a half to one hour coffee instead.
I going to try this. Thanks!
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/68809bfcd88dbd...
But maybe that's exactly the lesson.
Yes, that means no phone, no headphones, just you and your brain enjoying a walk. Let your mind wonder and be free.
Some Zen teachers think that it is impossible to meditate while walking as it keeps the mind moving rather than still. These are the folks that go against any kind of seasoning in food for the same reason. I always thought that was a very restrictive way to box in and needlessly constrain what meditation can be. If it works for you, great but don't sell it as the only path. That is the thing with a lot of folks, to try and overly define 'the only way', the smarter ones know there is a thousand paths to the top of the mountain.
Thích Nhất Hạnh used to swear by walking meditation, others would scoff at that. Each to their own.
'There is a thousand paths to the top of the mountain, the view is the same for all at the peak'
Walking, dancing or manual labor (for example gardening or cleaning) can all be done in a meditative way.
But these are likely different types of meditation that have different effects. Even just a calm, sitting meditations might be vastly different from another, depending on the meditation object.
Of course there are people who lean into specific types over the others as you describe, but I think many of these activities share a common core and experience.
I found I got by far the most intense deep thinking sessions while mowing the lawn with a push mower. It was a large-ish yard, took around an hour. It's boring, monotonous, requires no thought. Keeps your hands occupied so you won't be tempted to 'check something real quick'. And lastly, loud enough to block any other sounds that could make your mind drift(sirens, birds, dogs barking, etc).
I really want to point out that the purpose is not to concentrate so hard that focus remains. It's simply to be aware of attention drifting, and gently bring it back. Repeatedly, over time, this becomes easier and easier.
There is a sense of unwrinkling the mind that I achieve after a session. The inner voice drawing me toward the anxieties of life becomes quieter and quieter. The ability to choose to disregard thoughts and move on becomes stronger and stronger.
