41–48 of 48 posts
Meditate as much as you can. Being in the present moment lets you notice your thought patterns and impulses that you act on and puts you back in control. Art of letting go. You don't loose anything if you are not on a Facebook for a week. You don't loose anything by leaving your phone home for a day. Water still flows and birds still sing. When was the last time you saw the sun setting or felt the wind in your face,…
This is fine, but I tire of the obscure titles and needlessly leading writing styles. I often spend the first few paragraphs desperate for an abstract or any hint as to what I'm reading. Only in the end for it to be more exposition than idea. Click bait by another name. My kingdom for an abstract.
Meditate as much as you can. Being in the present moment lets you notice your thought patterns and impulses that you act on and puts you back in control. Art of letting go. You don't loose anything if you are not on a Facebook for a week. You don't loose anything by leaving your phone home for a day. Water still flows and birds still sing. When was the last time you saw the sun setting or felt the wind in your face,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That xkcd affirms that our sense of time and attention, and of quality and quantity, has been messed up like this since the Industrial Revolution. I can't safely presume what Randall's point is, but if it's to show that this is a foolish thing men have been saying without cause since time immemorial, he needs to go back further. Show me someone from 1600 complaining about the fast pace of life and I might buy it. But…
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/social-netw... (about quantity over quality, but not about speed, I think, but too good a quote to skip; from 1677): “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the University?” he asked. “Answer: Because of Coffea Houses, where they spend all their time.” There’s also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306016/ , which does…
A truly masterfully written article that makes us yearn for the days now past when everything, both inside and outside of ourselves, was much quieter. The amount of noise today is unprecedented. I am reminded of the movie _Her_ in which one sees a world where technology can move into the background and augment human relationships. Granted, there are moments in that film when the tech hurts instead of hinders, but com…
If you want to read a really scary prescient fiction book in this vein, check out Feed by M.T. Anderson. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Anderson_novel) Just chilling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main problem with, and reason why I don't leave my phone at home, is fear of missing an emergency call.
A few months ago I bought a Nokia 105. It was $25 on Amazon. It makes phone calls and text messages. The battery lasts almost a month. My wife can call me in an emergency. I wired up a few work outage alerts with IFTTT. That's about it. The best part about it is that it leaves me alone. When I turn my smartphone back on, it's incredible to see the barrage of worthless notifications that would have distracted me throu…
Meditate as much as you can. Being in the present moment lets you notice your thought patterns and impulses that you act on and puts you back in control. Art of letting go. You don't loose anything if you are not on a Facebook for a week. You don't loose anything by leaving your phone home for a day. Water still flows and birds still sing. When was the last time you saw the sun setting or felt the wind in your face,…
I've tried a million different apps (even got a Headspace subscription for a while), read Mindfulness in Plain English along with a tonne of other guides on it but it just never seems to click for me.
Meditate as much as you can. Being in the present moment lets you notice your thought patterns and impulses that you act on and puts you back in control. Art of letting go. You don't loose anything if you are not on a Facebook for a week. You don't loose anything by leaving your phone home for a day. Water still flows and birds still sing. When was the last time you saw the sun setting or felt the wind in your face,…
This gets asked all the time everywhere but I have to ask again, how do you get started? I've tried a million different apps (even got a Headspace subscription for a while), read Mindfulness in Plain English along with a tonne of other guides on it but it just never seems to click for me.
Just start doing it, perhaps every morning, dedicate 15 minutes of each day to the meditation.
By doing it alone from the start is difficult. That's where sangha - a group of persons who practice meditation - comes to play. Others will help you and it is also easier to get up and meditate if you know that others come as well.
Another tricky think is to get rid of your expectations. You may have many ideas what meditation should bring to you, just abandon them all and let meditation surprise yourself.
My teacher always likened meditation to the soil dissolved in the glass of water - put soil in the water and shake it. Now just put the glass on the table and let it sit there for a while. After some time all the soil sinks to the bottom and above that you have clear water.
Same goes with your mind and that's also an explanation, why it is necessary to be regular - your everyday activities just mix the soil with the water and you tend to loose the clarity.
Just repeat and repeat.
It is a wonderful activity.