Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also made a throwaway account to make a comment here. I also said the article was well written. I am an HN regular, but didn't want my medical problem tied to my HN account name. Is it that odd that we might have polar opposite views on the article? Or that having a somewhat similar experience to the author, that I might view the article differently than you do?
It is odd that you would make two different names just to talk up the article, yes.
I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
111–120 of 189 posts
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#112To de-clickbait this article: the author had a traumatic brain injury which eliminated her racing inner monologue.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#113A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#114At the other end of the scale, unrelated to severe trauma I truly believe we don't come back from anaesthesia entirely the same. I have no scientific basis for this belief, it's just how I feel about the experience of waking up from anaesthesia twice. The "who am I" in this article is strong. Who is asking the questions? Is it the same "me" from before time? The other one, knew what parmesan looked like.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#115Really well written, especially considering the author's plight. Regarding this bit: > The day of the accident I had been working on a project to improve how homeless people are placed into shelters. I say out loud, “I don’t care about homeless people” to see how it feels. It doesn’t ring true; I do care about homeless people. I just don’t feel like working. I wonder if that's directly to do with the brain damage or…
Now it's almost like I've made peace with my death, and don't much care about anything anymore. The only way I can rationalize what my brain's done is it's accepted a world without me, and is OK with that. It's odd, you'd think someone that survives a traumatic event would be overjoyed. I'm just "meh" most of the time now.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you don't exist, who wrote this comment? The hands. Driven by the chemical phenomena taking place in the brain given the information it had been fed previously. Both the hands and the brain and the memories are mine but not me. The same way my finger is (I won't be less me if I loose it, neither I will if I loose a memory of something, even of my name) and my car is. I am merely the observer of all these but ok,…
I've found this concept is near impossible to share without sounding, well, like you put it, "a new-age loon". We haven't really developed a system or language that succinctly expresses the nature of self or experience (well, I only know English. Perhaps other languages lend themselves better). For me, I find the simplest terms to be the most profound way of capturing what you said, but when I say them out loud to so…
As a rough (yet quite close) example: we have a word for swimming but you can't just say "swim" and see a person who never did like "aha! all I have is to swim!" yet all he has to do actually is to swim and breaking it into simpler concepts isn't a particularly fast way to teach them. I myself learnt to swim (after all the instructors with their theories failed to teach me) just by going into water and trying until I acquired a feeling of how to do it. Curiously enough, there is an easy way to instantly turn the swimming skill of by means of electric stimulation so otherwise normal person believing he can swim (because he did it so many times) would jump into water and immediately discover he doesn't remember how to.
If we consider the experiences and understanding we are discussing useful for others (I believe they can have great therapeutic value for many but also be dangerous for many) all we can do is develop and refine systems of guiding people to experience and understand these things themselves. Religions took care of this historically and Buddhism in particular has been particularly productive (and didn't lost nor hid that with time) but I believe a religion with all its mythological, mystical and dogmatic stuff is not really necessary, rational methods are possible.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#117Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#118A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases. One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or n…
> 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. Yeah, I've come to the same conclusion. When I was a kid it took 2 years to diagnose my, frankly quite textbook, hypothyroidism. Know who first diagnosed it? A friend of my mother's who worked the toll booth at the airport. Her dog had it, you see, so she recognized the symptoms. My mother had to go full Karen mode on a doctor to get them…
On Monday I was having coffee with a coworker and mentioned that my father had a valve replaced and he'd been in the hospital over the weekend. My coworkers immediately remarked, "Oh, he had a pericardial effusion." The medical staff had become so fixated on his erratic rhythm that they had forgotten the context of his case: if someone shows up with symptoms of a post op complication, don't start by trying to diagnose an unrelated malady. My coworker? His mother had a valve replacement and had a pericardial effusion.
That's a lot of words to say: checklists save lives.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#119This headline is like a bad r/nosleep title. Someday, somehow, I hope we move past this dumb clickbait style.
Yeah, I couldn't get very far in to it. Something about the author's tone and writing style was awkward and offputting.
I did not see the same tricks in this article.
Re: I know the secret to the quiet mind but wish I’d never learned it
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have good news for you. Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination, I can confirm you actually do exist.
> Ignoring the small chance that you're actually a figment of my imagination Haha. I always figure I'm not smart enough to come up with all these people, and if I was, I'd know their thoughts in advance because they'd be part of me.
Some meditation techniques can let you develop nearly direct perception without ideas but as soon as you want to use this to read someone's mind that already is an idea and makes this impossible.