81–90 of 263 posts
I'm lucky enough to not notice my tinnitus except when I try to do nothing.
- Rene Descartes
One of the most concise and to-the-point explanations of meditation I've ever seen. One thought I had while reading it: isn't trying to get more comfortable with doing nothing just another thing to do? isn't it another form of changing what already is? EDIT: I'm advocating and practicing mindfulness but I always have this thought on the background and it's a real dilemma. Any thoughts?
Meditation, in the Therevada tradition at least, never claimed to be nothing, it uses doing to undermine it.
Your brain is a prediction machine. I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function. I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable. Maybe using that life force to focus on the things you're avoiding by rumination and escapism is good enough, and we don't have to be cosplaying the dead to get there?
It's not.
> I am afraid doing nothing is inhibiting that function
It isn't.
> I think it's perfectly healthy to not want to be a vegetable
Not having an opinion about everything for 3 minutes != vegetable.
The author of the post is selling what he himself doesn't understand. Paying attention to your inner chatter without judgement is part of a much broader tradition. Westerners stealing bits from cultures they don't understand is nothing new. Neither is the polarizing fascination/dismissal it entails.
In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action stems to the industrial revolution when it was decided that workers should sell their time for a living. Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind…
> In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action Great book, but I have pinned down my obsession with action to my daily single cup of coffee habit. The idea of relaxation doesn't exist. When I sit down, it takes a minute before my brain desperately tries to find something to do. Guilt soon overcomes me. Even in the extreme anhedonia of the first days of caffeine withdrawa…
I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you. Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair? I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion. I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity whe…
It’s a result of people being less literate. “Existing” is used to describe passing time without meaning. What author should have used is “being”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action Great book, but I have pinned down my obsession with action to my daily single cup of coffee habit. The idea of relaxation doesn't exist. When I sit down, it takes a minute before my brain desperately tries to find something to do. Guilt soon overcomes me. Even in the extreme anhedonia of the first days of caffeine withdrawa…
I’ve been contemplating giving up coffee for two years, sometimes wanting to switch to green tea alone, for the reasons you articulated. Hasn’t happened except for brief stretches, and I’ll mark my coffee free era as one of sustainable effort.
It's amazing how productive I believe I am when I drink coffee, yet my attention is all over the place and I think a lot of that feeling of productivity is placebo and/or chemically induced euphoria. Next I want to try tea to compare.
One thing's for sure: I used to meditate best, for longer and deeper, when I was taking dexamfetamine medication and was abstaining from coffee. Caffeine for ADHD is overrated and I will gladly die on this hill.