Ask HN: Do you meditate and why?

I'm something of a career meditator - six years of an hour a day in my late teens and early twenties, and another decade of regular practice after that. I'm fairly slack about it these days, but the groove is well burned in.

In those kinds of quantities you get discontinuous results, but it's a PhD's worth of effort for some fairly intangible rewards. If anybody has questions, ask away.

1. Yes, I meditate. As of now I don't do sitting eyes-closed meditations regularly (I should). I keep up the state of not-attaching to thought, of remaining in "presence" (also called the I-am or Being). Once you get it, you will recognize what I mean.

2. Meditation has side benefits of helping with concentration problems, sleep issues, maybe even some psychological issues (there's a lot on it if you google 'meditation and neuro-science').

However, the original and main purpose of meditation was what is called "liberation" or awakening or enlightenment. Along the way, the grip of the fictional mind-created entity called the "self" or "me" weakens and at some stage just collapses. In a few cases this happens suddenly with no practice (e.g. Eckhart Tolle, Sri Ramana Maharshi). What happens further you will just have to experience yourself but this much I can say: as the false self or "ego" weakens and loses control, suffering also reduces and a time comes when you know that mental suffering is over for you.

There is far too much material on this. You can spend a whole life just reading (and as a result yourself get nowhere). Everyone will have their favorite books or resources or people. I would recommend Power of Now by Tolle as a very accessible book. There is also Sri Nisargadatta (I am That, and many other works, available on the internet freely in text/pdf form).

Most threads on HN recommend mindfulness and give you links to documents for that. Mindfulness puts the attention on the body and thus takes it away from the mental process. The references I gave (similarly) take the attention away from mind to what is present or aware (without going to the body). So these approaches still have a lot in common.

Whichever route you take, it is important to start practicing (stilling the mind) asap, and not get caught in the reading trap.

One of the reasons I meditate is because I find that it allows me to explore certain parts of the world that I believe are not accessible otherwise. This has to do with my meditation style: focusing on the "zeroes." Let me give you an example, when you breathe, you inhale and exhale, but there is a moment when you are neither inhaling nor exhaling, being aware of that moment is what I mean by focusing on the "zeroes." Using language from Zen, it's when expansion and contraction cease. There are zeroes everywhere around us, but we seldom become actively aware of them. I recommend it highly.