For December, I quit sugar, social media, and video games. It's been really interesting to notice what state I'm in when I go to reach for those things. Sometimes it's just habit, but often it's because I'm uncomfortable or in distress and want to avoid those feelings. But indulging in those things often just kicks the problem down the road.
Indeed, breaking my social media habits reminds me of Oscar Wilde talking about cigarettes: "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" The same for me is definitely true with Twitter and Facebook. An infinite feed of shiny, entertaining, funny, and outraging things, but almost nothing that's ever satisfying.
No, for the purposes of what I'm doing, HN was not included in that. From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way. No personalized, UAM-optimized algorithmic feed, no infinite river of small content bites, no rich mechanisms for interaction. And, very importantly, it has the noprocrast feature, which I long ago set to low usage levels.
And as others point out, it's not like I took some sort of vow of internet chastity to a god who will now smite me because I looked at HN. The point was to partially undo some bad habits that had built up during the election cycle. I'll often make some 1-month change at the beginning of the month. For me it's valuable mainly as self-experiment and a way of getting back to some baseline.
I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. Every time I see my total Upvote count go up, I get excited and I rush to see who has agreed with me again. If it goes down I immediately get angry and defensive that someone is downvoting what I said. And surely, you participate in the same process, even if you don't feel as strongly about it - otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?
It might not have been designed this way but it's exactly what it is. And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason.
This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.
You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoints at this moment none of the comment are in the negative. I'm sure that on Reddit the hivemind would've decided what the Right Opinion(tm) would be and people disagreeing would be sitting at -200 comment score.
Maybe the system could be pushed further and hide the scores even for your own comments though, removing all gamification. I don't know if it would improve things but I'd be curious to see how it would impact the quality of the discourse.
>otherwise, why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet or speak to again?
I mean even on forums/mailing lists/newsgroups/BBSs/imageboards without scoring system (or even publicly identifiable accounts) people would do the same thing, so I think that you overestimate the influence of the scoring system. I guess the closest equivalent on these other forums in general is getting "replies", i.e. engagement with your content, which I suppose is what we really crave in the end. We want people to listen to us.
Beyond that HN does have a few huge quality advantages over other social media. A big one is that the focus is still on textual content, not images and videos which means that you have to take some time to digest every story instead of mindlessly scrolling through the main page one gif at a time.
Disagree, a lot.
I've railed against it, but pg (the site owner) noted that voting as a proxy for like/dislike was not improper use on HN, much to my chagrin. In the early days (of my use, back on my first HN account) voting seemed mostly to be done to move a comment to it's "proper place".
Nowadays very good comments get greyed to non-readability. I find myself so often vouching for things I disagree with because comments that add well structured, logical, or interesting thoughts get voted out of view because they go against the group norms.
A lot of people seemed to have liked (do like?) the system that Slashdot came up with: choose a random group of people every day and give them moderator posts to police the discussions. However, if you post in that day you lose your moderator points.
They seem to have gone with a wisdom-of-the-subset-of-the-crowds instead of a wisdom-of-the-entire-crowd/mob.
News readers had scoring. Neither the NNTP protocol, nor NNTP servers, had a scoring mechanism, and certainly not one that was distributed over the world-wide Usenet infrastructure.
If you think otherwise, can you point to (e.g.) an RFC where it is documented?
As mentioned earlier, engagement seemed to be the goal. And the newsgroups I frequented were usually about getting help with a tech problem, or helping someone else out, which has largely been replaced by Stack Overflow.
Why not? Do you not value discussion, hearing new ideas, learning new concepts, having a soundboard for your thoughts? I also like sharing knowledge and participation in the process of humanity developing its collective memeplex (or at least fooling myself that I'm doing that). The fact that I'm not going to meet the people I discuss with has no bearing at all.
While what you describe in your comment is a factor, I cannot agree the rush is the dominant factor for commenting for me.
I do, but ultimately, I post because I want someone else to read what I said and comment on it(good or bad). It triggers the same release of oxitocin in my brain that seeing likes on a post does.
As to the design question, I think the biggest things it's missing for me versus modern social networks in terms of addiction potential: 1) river-of-content setup; 2) algorithmic feed with personalized engagement; 3) images; 4) video; 5) wide topic variety; 6) follow graph; 7) real-world social connections in the platform; 8) on-platform notifications; 9) on-phone notifications.
> why are you replying to strangers that you are unlikely to ever meet
For me this platform is as close as I have to discussing things with my profession. So both with my professional Twitter account and this account, I see it as an opportunity to influence my field a bit and support younger colleagues where I can. Were it not for that, I'd just consume it in a read-only way, as over the years I've come to see on-line argumentation as unhealthy for me.
It encourages and prominently displays good quality comments, and discourages and buries poor quality comments. It's not a perfect system as a lot of people vote based on whether they happen to agree rather than based on a comment's quality, but it's much better than nothing.
Mostly. There is an unconscious hive mind on HN too, and it downvotes when you disagree with it. It just happens that most commenters belong to it, at least most of the time.
edit: Now I see the numbers. The quality of posts is still far better than Reddit and the interactions less addictive, at least in my experience.
Slashdot's approach is to have different kinds of upvote (Insightful, Funny, etc) and different kinds of downvote (Off-topic, Flamebait, etc), and scores are clamped, iirc the lowest value is -1 and the highest is +5.
The act of writing out your thoughts gives them added clarity. This holds for long(er)-form comment-based sites such as HN and Reddit, not so much for FB and Twitter.
I realized the aforementioned, checking my points and who responded what to my thoughts. I actually made an adblock rule to block out my points. So I dont get that rush, because I realized that too, that everytime I arrive at HN, I just checked my points, and if it were more than before, I felt the rush. And I just knew it was bad, and that is not indeed what I come for to this site.
I use it only as a news delivery system, and in there there's already pathological signs - for instance I rarely skip reading anything that pushbullet displays. And if by accident I "brush it aside" (literally), then I open the app and recover the link.
I have noticed the same reactions myself, and dislike them. I am slowly and gradually learning to be able to deflect that angry defensive reply impulse. Simple awareness seems to be the first step. I don't know yet what to do about the upvote thrill.
business only policy, during 9-5. no news/socialmedia, cannot discuss irrelevant issues with my cofounder. Otherwise, I can go into rabbit holes for hours to research certain topic if my brain thinks that it is interesting.
Feels familiar, but I'm still in control. Much like with alcohol.
Just because HN doesn't have formal attributes of addictive social media like tailored feeds, shiny pictures, endless scrolling, etc., it doesn't mean that it's very different. I'm saying that, because I managed to get rid of almost all addictive sites, but HN sticks, and I still spend far more time here than I'd like to admit. If you look at it closer: this is an _endless_ list of _news_ with _a lot_ of _comments_ from your _peers_ that you _engage_ with. If you take words in italic it's obvious that this is exactly what makes other social media addictive. "News" and "peers" are the most important words here of course.
In a way, I believe sites like HN are even worse than others because they are somewhat disguised. I shrug FB, twitter and instagram easily (never actually even got into them), Reddit was harder but their stupid redesign made it much easier, HN sill stands for me.
I think you may need to add a few more months to this social media cleanse...
Like in a social media you mean?.. :)
I’m not sure there are « good » and « bad » platforms. It’s not about the platform, it’s about our usage.
Just like that if you want to eat less meat because of the environment, just eat less meat. If you eat selected meat once in a while on selected occasions this won't make you a heretic, because you are still reaching your goal of reducing your impact on the environment etc.
The people who say "if you want to reduce X you are a heretic if you don't abstain 100% from using X" are projecting their own lack of dicipline onto others — they feel they wouldn't have the discipline to do it, but also realise it would be good for them to have it. So they have to invent an excuse why this is a goal that cannot be reached, not worth reaching etc.
Being a free thinking and acting person fundamentally means also to notice when you are manipulating yourself by making your thinking fit the image you already have of the world. I for example often fall into the trap of "if I can't do it perfectly it might not be worth doing at all", and because I know that, I try to work against it.
So what your comment does here is undermining another people's effort to be in control of their social media environment. Why you deem such an act necessary should be something you should know yourself.
For some context I don't consider things like forums to be social media. As an early internet denizen I had lots of thoughtful discourse with folks that reminds me of what I experience at HN. I continue to use IRC, which I also don't consider to be social media.
So what makes them different? I think it's the underlying technology. The graph, our ability to search it and correlate immediate (mostly irrelevant) commonality is what makes things dangerous.
Humans are full of dumb or awful thoughts. They'll combat these ideas or thoughts with alternatives regularly which end up referring to as cognitive dissonance. The result is that these lesser ideas widdle away or drop off completely. On social media, the graph doesn't forget and continues to tie you to people, ideas, and thoughts that are increasingly useless. While this sells ads and generates interest in new products it doesn't align well to the way humans have discourse, socialize, or just relate in general.
That to say, HN isn't social media to me.
The articles and the conversations are better quality than on any other social media with the added bonus that what I read is relevant for my daily job and career.
At the same time, it's still distracting, I almost never finish an article and go straight to the comments, thinking "entertain me, comment section". I feel productive, but in reality, it's superficial knowledge, and spending time here is time I don't spend on actually working on my goals.
In the end, it's all about balancing the pros and cons. For Facebook, Instagram, it's easy, I don't use them. For Twitter, I focus exclusively on tech so that I don't end up in a pointless yet vicious fight. For HN, it's spending 10 minutes on the top articles, keeping up with important industry news every second day.
I've spent countless hours in the last ~5 years on reading seemingly useful articles, and comment sections.
I cannot pinpoint even one instance where anything helped me IRL.
Something might've helped indirectly, but the connection is not clear.
As a personal example, I have noticed how my way of discussing heated topics has changed based on discourse I have seen here.
And this would not have happened if I didn't invest time similar to yourself.
This is a hit or miss though, because you either identify specific ways to improve or not, and you may or may not actually improve those identified skills by reading trough the comments (and not taking action).
If improvement is the goal, then there are more efficient ways to eg. learn better ways to discuss heated topics (like reading a specific book on the topic, or attending a "Nonviolent Communication" workshop).
The more I think about this the more HN only seems like a place to get a specific flavour of entertainment (which I personally like), but nothing more.
HN content tends to be longer-form which I feel is quite different from the typical infinite scrolling for quick dopamine hits on sites like Reddit or Twitter or Facebook.
If you disable the notifications, that's good for you. But you're a small exceptional minority.
HN afaik has no such feature at all.
Notifications, addictive design and gamification are really bad practices that we should try to avoid - but the underlying drug of social media is that someone noticed and reacted to your content, and HN provides that just like Facebook or Twitter.
I turn off notifications on my phone for almost any app. It's just way too annoying. I'll get to it when I get to it! I guess I'm part of that minority mentioned above but as you say I do keep coming back too. It's not black and white but we can stay on the healthy side.
If I try to find an analogy, it's the difference between sitting by the fire in the evening and chatting with other people vs. spending the entire day running around listening to and actively spreading rumors.
I don’t consider HN to be social media anymore than a discussion forum on gardening is social media.
HN is not a SV startup selling ads spying on you manipulating your behaviour to sell crap or breaking democracy or depressing teenagers into suicide, it’s just not comparable and these false equivalences are just so tiring. Stop trying to bring other people down.
Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit religious order, set up a daily ritual to help keep himself (and those in the order) centred:
> To help me remember the five steps, I like to use a 5-Rs mnemonic:
> Relish the moments that went well and all of the gifts I have today.
> Request the Spirit to lead me through my review of the day.
> Review the day.
> Repent of any mistakes or failures.
> Resolve, in concrete ways, to live tomorrow well.
* https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/ignatian-spir...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Exercises_of_Ignatiu...
If you go online you can probably find a Jesuit retreat centre not too far from you where you can spend (say) eight days in total silence and seclusion; you can optionally (though recommended) talk with a spiritual director once a day to help you sort through anything that bubbles up during your stay.
The BBC had a short doc where a bunch of random men and women went through the exercise (episodes are available online if you search):
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2117584/
Perhaps worthwhile, even if that is not your particular worldview.
(This is separate than what monks do, which is seclusion from the world.)
Most faiths in the world have spiritual traditions where silence and reflection are done. Probably possible to find similar retreat centres following their traditions. It seems that it is only the modern secular worldview that hasn't adopted something (yet?). I think this is something most modern philosophical worldviews (especially in the materialist bend) overlook: human 'spiritually' (for lack of a better word).
very valuable quote
Facebook has been making it pretty easy for me to quit - it's mostly been an unending stream of boring advertisements with maybe one or two meaningful posts from friends.
It's akin to eating processed snacks when you're hungry, instead of nutrient whole foods
Whatever condition we picture to ourselves, if we muster all the good things which it is possible to possess, royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet, when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.
Hence it comes that play and the society of women, war, and high posts, are so sought after. Not that there is in fact any happiness in them, or that men imagine true bliss to consist in money won at play, or in the hare which they hunt; we would not take these as a gift. We do not seek that easy and peaceful lot which permits us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the labour of office, but the bustle which averts these thoughts of ours, and amuses us.
Reasons why we like the chase better than the quarry.
Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures.
The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self. For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.
This is all that men have been able to discover to make themselves happy. And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
And talking about the kings, one of the pious said : “If the kings and the children of the kings knew what [felicity] we are in, they would fight us over it with their swords.”
Working from home this entire year, I have tried to practice taking at least 15 minutes everyday, couple of times a day, laying down and just listening to my thoughts, understanding my anxieties. Trying to understand why I feel the way I do, instead of running away from them by distracting myself by various means.
This new habit of mine truly has been a life saver in this year.
I didn't read his works enough, none apart from the above quote in fact, to comment on whether or not he recommends acknowledging our inner thoughts and contemplating on them.
As for me, I feel real and lasting relief from worshipping Allaah. It's something very tangible and enlightening. It might seem counterintuitive, but it does boost my productivity a lot, even though I ignore thinking about work during prayer.
Now, having belief in Allaah has its manifest benefits. I am happy as I write this. I am able to keep afloat a bit in trying times. I was able to come out of depression (and quite a few other mental illnesses). None of it I could achieve except by Allaah's help.
When I used to go to hospital for psychiatric treatment, the doctor used to advise me that whenever I feel anxious, I lie down on a bed, relax and think of some beautiful place, in order to ward off the bad feelings. So, even the best advice the doctor could give me was this.
And what better place to think of than Paradise?
What Pascal was explicit in saying is that there is no inherent happiness in material possessions. But if you know that there is a life after death, that there is a Paradise and a Hell, that there is a Merciful God who, if you believe in Him and obey Him, will reward you for you good deeds and forgive your bad deeds, you will be humble, you will be hopeful, and you will be happy.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
And I laid me down with a will.
Here he lies where he longed to be;
And the hunter home from the hill.
Not every religion considers eternal life desirable. In some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, for example, the ultimate goal is to leave the cycle of death and rebirth.. not in to paradise, but in to nothingness.
Also, the ultimate reality in Buddhism, Hinduism, and (incidentally) mystic forms of Islam, is often described as being beyond words and even beyond conception, so there is a limited amount that could be said about it in ordinary language -- though that hasn't stopped people from trying.
In Buddhism one often hears the teachings described as the finger pointing towards the moon. Language may be inadequate to describe ultimate reality, but it can point to it.
The so called mystic Islam also known as Sufism, is a deviant sect, and is fundamentally a gateway to polytheism, as it borrows many practices from polytheistic religions. In fact, many of the famous ancient sufis have roots in India, where paganism and idol worshipping was and is still prevalent. Hence sufis are adored by Hindus.
I hope i could be clear to you
You'll find Sunnis who think Shiites are heretics, and Shiites who think Sunnis are heretics, and both are major branches of Islam.
Of course you'll find both Sunnis and Shiites who think Sufis are heretics, and Sufis who think Sunnis and Shiites are heretics (or at least don't understand the true or secret meaning of the Koran or of Islam).
And does the Koran have a secret meaning, or only a surface meaning? This important question itself is also a matter of opinion and will differ based on who you ask.
There have also been mystics in Islam apart from the Sufis: Avicenna, the Ismailis, and Alawites spring to mind.
As a non-Muslim, when I see the members of these sects disagree with one another as to who is a "true Muslim" or what is or isn't Islam, what reason do I have for believing any one of them over the others?
Their appeals to scripture, lineage, famous commentators and the like are not very convincing both because as a non-Muslim I have no reason to believe in any of them and because you can easily find other people who claim to be Muslims making pretty much the same appeals in support of completely different conclusions.
At this point in my life, anyone who considers the Koran their central scripture is a Muslim in my eyes.
If you have a better definition that doesn't rely on appeals to scripture, to lineage, nor to the authority of some person, I'd love to hear it.
I will start from the basics:
The fundamental word of Islam, the one word which differentiates between who is a Muslim and who is not is the well known Kalima (كلمة) of Islam, La ilaha illallaah. Which translates to there is none worthy of worship except Allaah. This statement encapsulates the entire monotheistic creed of Islam in it. It is the pivot of any Muslim’s religion. A Muslim strives to preserve this statement in his heart while believing in it. He does this by trying to ensure harmony in his speech and his deeds.
One who lacks firm belief in his heart in this word, is a weaker believer than one who has firm belief, even though both might utter the word in the same manner.
Though we can’t see what the heart contains and hence we can’t normally judge a person’s level of faith, his outward actions, to an extent, do communicate his level of belief. So much about this word.
The one who brought this word to the people was a man called Muhammad (upon him be peace) over 14 centuries ago. The people who he first invited to his religion were the people of of his birthplace, the city of Makkah. His people were originally on the religion of Abraham, worshipping the One God of all that exists, Allaah. But in due course of time, they forgot the truth and started worshiping idols.
So Muhammad (upon him be peace) was sent to them as Messenger by Allaah, just as Messengers from among men were sent by Allaah to earlier people, in order to warn them about the consequences of idol worship and to call them to the worship of the true God, Allaah. Some Messengers which were sent before him were Noah, Lot, Moses, Jonah, Jesus, all mentioned in the Bible and Qur-aan.
Muhammad (upon him be peace), warned the people of eternal hell if they did not believe in his Message and desist from idol worship. And he promised Paradise for whoever believed in him and acted upon what he commanded.
His Prophetic Mission lasted 23 years, of which the first 13 were spent in Makkah and the last 10 were in Madinah. He was made a Messenger at the age of 40, and he dies at the age of 63.
Throughout his mission, Allaah sent the Verses of His Book, Al -Qur-aan to guide him and his followers, gradually teaching them the rituals of prayer, charity, pilgrimage. As the Messenger (upon him be peace) and his followers were the subject of great deal of ridicule and torture, Allaah, in these Verses, also supported them and encouraged them. Allaah also taught His Messenger how to present his Message to people in the elegant way.
That’s all I could muster. Wish you best.
This illustrates that you have a fundamentalist streak in you: you've described a form of Islam you don't like as being "deviant". You're gatekeeping Islam.
Sufism is a later invention.
Eventually the prince does come into contact with suffering, and leads to him trying to find an end to suffering.
This doesn't fully make sense to me.
Sure, at some point your pleasure will end, but do you have to judge something by its end? Why not judge it by its beginning or middle instead?
It's like saying "don't enjoy your meal, because at some point later you're going to get hungry".
That makes no sense to me.
Also, regarding the lack of meaning of distraction and entertainment, it's not like "nothingness" (which Buddhism tries to put in its place) has any meaning either. So I'm not sure why one should seek to put one meaningless thing in the place of another.
Suffering can be temporarily staved off, but not completely removed.
Pretty words, but do they mean anything? For example, if I reach this state, will it be revealed to me why there is something rather than nothing? I think not, otherwise someone would have reported back with the answer already.
I'm interested in meditation to learn more about my own body and mind, maybe improve my life somehow. But IMHO the discussions around it could do with less of this type of mystic woo.
FWIW I have a friend who is deep into spirituality, still works at a FAANG but definitely feels like he can attain higher states of awareness in his meditations. I don’t see him active on social media, he leads a reasonably ascetic life and so on.
This person doesn’t have much success in making others believe. At best, he gets ‘hey, I am happy that you’re happy’ from folks like me, most feedback is around ‘mystic woo’. I have another friend deep in this world, but she balances it with real world and doesn’t really proselytize.
I think it is very much a catch 22. You won’t believe it unless you’re doing it. So if belief is required for you to give it a shot, that’s a non-starter.
I would say try it out and make up your own mind! What do you got to lose anyway - stay away from holy men who make you uncomfortable, start with books or YouTube!
If the belief is weak (or false), it might lead to confusion and distrust, which will make it impossible to learn anything.
Also, experiencing heightened states of awareness is not necessarily beneficial, people on drugs experience it routinely.
Take the biases that we've heard about in image recognition where these ML models misclassify black people. If a person had done that you would accuse them of racist beliefs.
Why is the computer model so different? Because you don't want to believe that computers can reach consciousness? (I don't either at this point but time will tell. We don't really know enough - or I don't - about what consciousness is and how it works.)
Otherwise, chatbots are very good at learning abusive and racist language. It's due to our belief that it's not right and decent that we train them using a bias. And it's only due to beliefs that we rein in the rogue AI which misclassifies black people.
Edit: If you still want to think of belief as an input node whose link has weight, then set the weight to infinite
Well, they have, but nobody believes them :)
In any case, I understand your attitude to the mystic woo. It used to put me off a lot when I started meditating.
Now I take it as simply something that's there. They are statements that someone makes. If they're talking about states that someone could reach and they also give instructions, I might consider trying them to see what happens.
In any case as a programmer and scientifically minded meditator, I encourage you to pursue your interest in meditation. Try different techniques until you find something that works. Take it easy, take it slow, cultivate play and joy in your practice. If you manage to do that, you'll reap the fruit of your practice.
I wish you good luck!
Yes.
> For example, if I reach this state, will it be revealed to me why there is something rather than nothing?
More-or-less. You do get the punchline, and the joke is quite good.
> I think not, otherwise someone would have reported back with the answer already.
They have, over and over and over again. However, it's not something that fits in words. You have to stop wording in your mind, and know. Literally the first line in the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the true Tao."
Meditation sans "mystic woo" is like using your car only to drive from your garage to your mailbox at the end of the driveway to get your mail and back. You might learn a little more about your own car, and maybe improve your mail-retrieval somehow, but you're not really going anywhere, eh?
My takeaway is that there's something in this meditation thing. At the very least, concentrating on a static imaginary shape activates some kind of drainage system in the brain: for a few minutes you feel what a clogged pipe would feel when it's being cleaned by a powerful water stream. That effect alone seems valuable.
Regarding the meaning of meditation, my conclusion is that it's a whistle. Just like you'd produce a certain whistle to summon an animal or a bird, you'd sharply imagine a certain shape or symbol to summon ideas or certain effects. The former is how you get inspiration. "Mysticism" begins when you are able to produce this whistle the right way and when you know which thoughts or symbols to target.
The most comprehensive explanation of meditation that's available in English is probably lamrim, volume 4 (500 or so pages, described by its author as a brief summary of key concepts from canonical sources that an interested reader should read himself).
And yes Marxism has died. Communism is dead. It’s just a name for brutality and dictatorship.
What do the words "occult practices" mean to you? Do you consider them bad? If so, why?
Contemplation of dependent origination is a meditative practice.
Although a bit verbose and repetitive at times, I liked the exploration of the concepts of attention and peripheral awareness. I may give the "stage one" instructions a try, and buy the rest of the book if it goes well.
In the first few sentences it talks about the "soul" wanting to return back to it's source, the "supreme consciousness". Then a couple pages further, a statement about reincarnation:
"If you don’t believe in rebirth then this book will be of little use to you. As I said earlier, meditation to me is the most powerful tool to harness and channelize the restive and other tendencies of the mind we’ve been carrying with us over lifetimes."
Is there?
Sounds like a walk in the park for an ascetic. We forget how comfortable we’ve become, 250 years ago this would have been your average Tuesday.
"The researchers collected data during the unique ceremony in Tibet, where nuns were able to raise their core body temperature and dry up wet sheets wrapped around their bodies in the cold Himalayan weather (-25 degree Celsius) while meditating. Using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings and temperature measures, the team observed increases in core body temperature up to 38.3 degree Celsius..."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130408084858.h...
If it’s scientific then it must be well understood in terms of cause and effect. In which case, it is like any other physical phenomenon, nothing special.
And if it’s not scientific, rather if it’s a mystery, then scientists will have to take a call on what is.
It was more about questioning the relevance (and authenticity) of "deep mysteries" and "existence" etc. It was not about whether or not human beings can train themselves to endure such difficulties. Which they can, apparently.
When you said "it would be a cake walk for an ascetic" I thought that by ascetic you meant one who is into meditation and all such "deep realities". Not Wim Hof.
Nevertherless, I personally don't see any virtue in being hungry in -1 degree celsius, if I have food and a warm home. Except in case someone is making money out of it, like Wim.
Why are ants and amoebas always moving? Their biological drives continue to give them orders and so they are never satiated.
Wouldn't that itself be a form of distraction. Your subconscious will be activated but your conscious mind be distracted.
I'm fact, if you look at African tribes and their original lifestyle you will realize how little time they had to spend on getting food and how much time they were able to spend just being happy, playing, drinking hallucinogenic substances to get into an enlightening trance etc.
Agreed.
> I'm fact, if you look at African tribes and their original lifestyle you will realize how little time they had to spend on getting food and how much time they were able to spend just being happy, playing, drinking hallucinogenic substances to get into an enlightening trance etc.
Generalizations about foraging populations are fraught with problems because there was a lot of diversity among them and its not possible to study them in a "pure" (untouched by agricultural peoples) setting.
Maybe because ant society expects it and can only function with ants constant in motion.
This is really interesting from a modern perspective. I'm an audiophile - I've spent countless hours just sitting in a chair in front of a stereo system I've spent a couple thousand on. If I ever lapse into non-attention to the music, I try and get back to the music. It's like mindfulness meditation, but unlike the monk, my mind is focusing on a sense, not emptying itself.
On the other hand, I can't lie in bed for more than two minutes without deep introspection - my morality, arguments for and against all positions, what projects I want to work on, the papers I've read, etc.
But before writing some comments on this website and elsewhere, I'll have a deep think about what I'm arguing, and why. Other times I'll just jump at it for the engagement, the thrill of refreshing in the morning to check the Hacker News Engagement Number, whatever else. I've tried to make an effort to not read outrage-bait on Reddit, I've deleted my Twitter account years ago, I've done countless things. This i my third HN account.
The best part of my day, after work and my energy is exhausted? Gaming. I only play one game - online and multi-player, with an Icelandic man I've never met. It's all a distraction. Why continue learning piano, Japanese, philosophy, literature, introspection, when I have this pleasure right here? Where will I be in 30 years? 20 years? Even writing this comment sadness comes over me.
To think that in the 19th century, there were men being compared to Hegel and Feuerbach at age 21. What the hell am I doing?
Like 3-5 men (i.e. the Young Hegelians) among a billion people?
It's not like it was some common accomplishment...
"That is why we like noise and activity so much. That is why imprisonment is such a horrific punishment. That is why the pleasure of being alone is incomprehensible. That is, in fact, the main joy of the condition of kingship, because people are constantly trying to amuse kings and provide them with all sorts of distraction.—The king is surrounded by people whose only thought is to entertain him and prevent him from thinking about himself. King though he may be, he is unhappy if he thinks about it"
https://books.google.com/books?id=KezeDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=P...