21–24 of 24 posts
There are many ways to reach a state of Flow , coding and meditating may get you there, but as practices I don't think they have more in common than skydiving, rock climbing or surfing a perfect wave..
Personally.. meditating for me is more is like a call to System.gc() on my brain.
There is a significant difference though. When you are coding, you experience flow with your mind already full of things. When meditating, you start with an empty mind, so the perceptive influence of flow is far more noticable. It's enough to throw you out of the meditative state if you are unprepared.
The goal of meditation is different than that of coding as well. Meditation starts from an empty mind so that you once you reach a meditative state, you may choose to do any number of things. One exercise the instructor had us perform was to find a meditative state, then meditate on the first thought that entered our mind, and to not sway from that thought.
When you're coding, you are keeping many things in mind. I find that when you end up in the "flow", it is because you have pushed everything out of your mind as a result of there being no space for it. Meditation is about pushing everything out of your mind so there is space for anything.
In the Buddhist traditions meditation is used as a tool to examine the subtle nature of the mind's processes, how they may create suffering through craving, aversion & identification (dependant origination) which initially at least requires some down-time to bring the mind to a relatively quiet state. You really learn a lot about craving when all the goodies are taken away, similarly you learn about aversion from the small discomfort from sitting.
I love coding, it's my main intellectual outlet, but I never want to be someone who has to lug along a laptop on holiday because the pain of being away from code is too great, I take any such pain as indication that I'm broken in some way (addicted). If I simply coded every time I feel that addiction I'd never truly discover how dependant my happiness is on coding & I'd never discover that I can be happy without coding. I think coding is nicer when I'm not addicted to it.
Exceptionally misguided. Having meditated for an average of forty minutes every day (sometimes for as much as 2 hours a day, in 40 minute blocks) for the last half year and having coded many, many hours in my life, I can say that this conclusion is decidedly incorrect. Most forms of meditation are about doing nothing except breathing. Coding, like any other task, is far from this. Again, exceedingly misguided.
Exceptionally misguided. Indeed, I would even say such misconceptions are harmful, since coding has quite the opposite effect. After a day of too much or too intensive coding, I usually find that my brain continues to be occupied with coding problems. E.g. when I'm half-sleeping I see problems that don't exist (at least not in sleeping ;)). Meditation has the opposite effect: the mind becomes calm and unoccupied. It'…