Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Men who stare at walls

alexselimov.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 346 posts

Re: Men who stare at walls

#321

Post by lanstin »

suyash wrote: post #46
raincom wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trāṭaka

Very powerful but takes much practice

There's two aspects to meditation: focus and insight. Focusing the attention on one specific thing, whether a statue, flame, the breath, a mantra, increases the ability to direct focus. When focus is reasonably steady and one relaxes into just being a bit, then the insights about how what we think of our unitary self is a composite set of conditions and how composite sets of conditions constantly change, and so on, start to affect our understanding of our body/mind and life and all that. This practice sound like a focus based practice, which are useful and give rise to all sorts of enjoyable mental states (and can indeed be very instrumentally useful for managing anxiety or increasing performance or that sort of thing), but not really the same as loosening attachment to the ups and downs of each moment.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#322

Post by lanstin »

timacles wrote: post #42
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #10

Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.

it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent. In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness , by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena. True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.

The effort to still the mind moves the mind so much. Zen also teaches one to stop fiddling with the mind/body so things unfold into a natural smoothness. One may have stupid thoughts filling the monologue without becoming upset and without having the current moment obscured - busy monologue is just more color like the clouds above or the ants around.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#323

Post by Olshansky »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #168
Olshansky wrote: post #137

I hope people see this comment. Meditation is to mental training and focus, as going to the gym is to physical training. Socials killed our attention span. Agents are literally making us context switch even more. Putting aside the whole "I am at piece and one with the world" part of meditation, it is extremely hard. I'm also no expert. When I'm waiting for something to finish (agent, compilation, etc), I've found tha…

The hard part is that the training looks like nothing from the outside, so it's easy to dismiss (in a way)

This is great. Puts Rick Rubin's appearance into perspective.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#324

Post by Olshansky »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #231
Olshansky wrote: post #137

I hope people see this comment. Meditation is to mental training and focus, as going to the gym is to physical training. Socials killed our attention span. Agents are literally making us context switch even more. Putting aside the whole "I am at piece and one with the world" part of meditation, it is extremely hard. I'm also no expert. When I'm waiting for something to finish (agent, compilation, etc), I've found tha…

I am a pretty peaceful person, but working with agents frequently (daily) makes me furious. I wonder if the context switching you mentioned leads to more fatigue, which makes me much more irritable.

That's the case for me.

I still use agents for everything, but started on doing my best to single-task.

Think or plan while it's running.

Feels wasteful, but it's powerful.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#325

Post by Olshansky »

HerbManic wrote: post #212
Olshansky wrote: post #137

I hope people see this comment. Meditation is to mental training and focus, as going to the gym is to physical training. Socials killed our attention span. Agents are literally making us context switch even more. Putting aside the whole "I am at piece and one with the world" part of meditation, it is extremely hard. I'm also no expert. When I'm waiting for something to finish (agent, compilation, etc), I've found tha…

One thing I do point out to folks is that meditation comes in many shapes, there is no one size fits all. For some it is silent sitting Zazen style, for others it is walking mediation, or a sort of physical almost martial arts type thing. There is a thousand different style in between that. Do what works for you. If that is staring at walls, neat!

Thanks for mentioning this.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#326

Post by MiDu16 »

this is similar to Kasina meditation, one of the oldest concentration practices in the Buddhism. You focus on one of 10 subjects including Earth, Water, Air, Fire (elements), Blue, Red, Yellow, White (colours) and Space, Lights. These subjects can be found anywhere and most importantly neutral so you won't or unlikely to have sensual attachments and association. This is considered an entry to mediation. It's easier than focusing breathing because breathing is movement and very natural so you're likely to lose focus. The biggest advantage of breathing to 10 entry subjects of Kasina meditation is it's everywhere. Effort or single-mindedness or focus is one of 8 noble paths in Buddhism. And meditation is to improve focus/concentration. At least that one of the purposes of meditation.

Edit for grammar

Re: Men who stare at walls

#327

Post by MiDu16 »

cfors wrote: post #92

The spirit of this is correct, but a better approach to this is going for a walk with just your thoughts. Yes, that means no phone, no headphones, just you and your brain enjoying a walk. Let your mind wonder and be free.

"a walk with just your thoughts" can lead you to many places include good and bad places. A mediative walk is to focus on nothing else but your body including your breath, your arms, your steps, the sensation of skins, the smell you breath in and out, the sound you hear. You don't need to focus on all of these at once but you can just pick one and focus on it for a period ideally as long as possible, but you can switch between them at the start. All of these is very difficult but not impossible if you do in a crowded city when everything changes very fast and you're exposed to many things that you tend to like or dislike. Of course, if you're a zen master, you can meditate everywhere but personally I feel I'm very far from it. The fact that I struggle to focus even in quiet places tells a lot about how much I need to practice.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#328

Post by MiDu16 »

dgb23 wrote: post #242
HerbManic wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on who you ask. Some Zen teachers think that it is impossible to meditate while walking as it keeps the mind moving rather than still. These are the folks that go against any kind of seasoning in food for the same reason. I always thought that was a very restrictive way to box in and needlessly constrain what meditation can be. If it works for you, great but don't sell it as the only path. That is the thin…

Rumi (the Sufi mystic) apparently walked and turned in circles in order to contemplate. The tradition merges music and movement with philosophy and religious mysticism. Walking, dancing or manual labor (for example gardening or cleaning) can all be done in a meditative way. But these are likely different types of meditation that have different effects. Even just a calm, sitting meditations might be vastly different f…

Yes, everything can be mediatative but it's more the matter of how you do it. You can do gardening but still renumerate about past and future. It's all about focusing on what you're doing and nothing else, centralising all 6 senses to one point of fucus.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#329

Post by reg_dunlop »

bitexploder wrote: post #302
reg_dunlop wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation. And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion. Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others af…

Staring does something interesting. It does slowly reduce brain waves, but it is harder to hit theta with eyes open. And it works very differently initially. With eyes closed meditation where we, say, follow the breath we use the salience network to slowly chill the DMN for a bit. When you stare at a wall the salience network is what deactivates letting the DMN rip to try and figure what predictions are useful. But i…

I'm curious what is meant by

> ...recalibrates the Salience Network's threshold for alarm.

Superficial googling reveals superficial information about the SN.

And more specifically, i'm curious what sort of physiological signals could verify recalibration.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#330

Post by swah »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #313
hgomersall wrote: post #152

I've recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

I go for walks or runs--without headphones. If I listen to music or a podcast, my mind doesn't wander. I need that quiet for processing.

Thats why people use shows and podcasts for falling asleep - is that bad?
Post reply on HN