Thread by @nickcammarata

There’s no attention police stopping you from just attending to pleasant sensations

Also I totally get how monks were celibate now. They had more or less directly comparable — but way more fun — tools

This is a good thing by the way! It’s easier to eat your vegetables (train your concentration) when each vegetable comes with two hundred spoons of sugar (extremely potent tranquil bliss)

Except sugar gets worse when you have too much, tranquil bliss does not. Although after an hour or so you usually want to get up and do something else

The funny part is how wholesome it looks from the outside. I’ve stopped all drugs / alcohol, been eating lightly and healthily, sex drive down, barely desire caffeine for the first time since I was 13. But not for any wholesome reason — they’re just all really mild in comparison

Contra, it’s common in meditation for someone to get to a new state and get excited by it, then have it go away later. But that doesn’t mean getting excited is bad or that the state isn’t real. Just take my spoonfuls of sugar with at least one spoonful of salt

Contra contra we also have 3000+ years of people discovering how great this stuff is and it mostly not going away for them

(Meditation in general has plenty of risks, but jhana specifically is one of the higher ROI things in life I think)

Also I’m becoming increasingly convinced that pleasure is a scarcity mindset surplus mindset thing. Once you can get as much as you want, you don’t crave it in the same way, and don’t optimize for it. I’ve seen it in plenty of others, starting to see it in myself too

If I had to bet, most drug addiction doesn’t have to do with pure clean pleasure, but with some correlate mechanism of action (eg dopamine receptor tolerance) that’s confusing us today

It’s very easy to go from states that make cocaine look mild and be like that was nice, I’m gonna go workout or hang out with a friend now though. Nearly everyone in that state reports that behavior, but today’s story of reward optimization doesn’t capture that

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1420793357383634949

Also this is probably cryptic but I think Alexander Technique pairs very well with jhana. Make awareness big, non-do whatever (eg exercise, socialize) set attention to pleasure to get the exponential increase. You get both the effortlessness of non-doing + pleasure of jhana

My power level isn’t high enough to know for sure though. I can get into it for like three seconds before everything short circuits and spins out of control

Luckily I can test it seconds at a time, and fast feedback loops usually mean fast learning

https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1420798548120068100

That said the three seconds my brain can manage weightlifting, expanded awareness and non-doing, and first jhana are pretty sweet, even if I’m exhausted by second four