We should integrate getting a glimpse of samadhi into the basic educational curriculum. The world would look different if every person knew from experience how much richer life can be, without changing material conditions at all, just from tasting the present moment more fully It’s one of those things you can’t unsee. Increasing the richness and resolution of present moments in general is just by far a more powerful lever than trying to shape the present moment into how you like it while it’s low resolution, cloudy, and frazzled

pretty much every meditation technique ends up in infinite low-viscosity space if you do it well enough

the reason it's not already infinite space is because of feedback loops caused by resistance, and so if your meditation is anything but that those loops should wind down vipassana all the contractions -> infinite space
jhana all the way -> jhana 8 -> infinite space
metta -> love dissolves contractions -> infinite space
concentrate on breath -> everything else falls away -> infinite space
do nothing -> contractions let go -> infinite space

the vast majority of thoughts are about ourselves because vast majority of our attention is spent pointing us towards the inside of our head the attention there is so strong it congeals into a block and we think we “are” behind our eyes, floating. Which obviously doesn’t make any sense. The mind is generated and you’re all of it, the whole scene, not just one part

Is there any good research on this question: do the best romantic relationships get there mostly because it was an effortless awesome fit, or because they’re really good at working together to make it awesome personally all my best work relationships (3) were an effortless awesome fit, and vastly better than all the other ones, the other ones were so far behind I can’t imagine any way we could have made them as good as the first set. But maybe work and romance are different?

one odd but surprisingly useful advice I got when I started meditating is to have an (imaginal) "spiritual board" that you can ask for help on your path

mine had hayao miyazaki, leonardo, and a few other people I've read a lot of. If I could do it again I'd add steve irwin

https://twitter.com/icyHive/status/1740344084886352333

it's similar where if you imagine what your smart friend would do in a situation you somehow get smarter. Like putting on different hats, seeing from different perspective. Asking an imaginal X what to do is magically more effective than trying to answer yourself in their style

I don’t endorse counting on a metaphorical god showing up in a few years, but at this point I do think it’s worth making sure you have a god-friendly plan

good to make sure you enjoy how you spend this time, prob a bad trade rn to be miserable now in hopes of good distant future bad time in history to join the workforce as a junior investment banker slaving away at boring work at the hopes of being high up one day

the aesthetics around meditation are so bad. it’s not about grinding and sharpening your concentration and battling your demons, it’s not grasping on you get shot into mystical godlike states

it’s about relaxing and letting go, relax enough and you will be fully enlightened I would bet every single follower new to meditation that tries to meditate tries too hard. Def at least 99%. Try less hard. If you try to try less hard you’ll still try too hard. Take meditation 1/10th as seriously, it’s all relaxing, whatever gets you to try less hard do that

i think im antiea radicalized now

my friends treat their body like a playground (experiments with drugs, meditations, new exercises etc), cycle through dangerous sports, startups, and various ideologies. as a group nothing has hurt their wellbeing as much as ea as ea guilt got me into ai safety and then largely into meditation to eliminate my own desires so I could work more hours in ai safety, which most eas thought was commendable. I’d convert all dollars to “lives if I donated” automatically, couldn’t avoid the subconscious calculation

it’s crazy how chill we are about weed give its risks. half the psychonauts I know who will fearlessly take research chemicals on a tuesday are terrified by weed

horror stories are so often weed or 5-meo-dmt, but only the latter is known as a nuclear option a common retort is it depends on dose, but so does everything. 5-meo-dmt at low dose is basically a muscle relaxer, but it’s good that it’s known as a nuclear option bc of what it does at higher dose

One thing people misunderstand about meditation is it’s superlinear. As you progress your sensory clarity and attention gets sharper, helping you let go faster. It’s common for meditators to make more progress in 6mo than their last 10yrs of practice

paulgraham.com/superlinear.ht… It might be the only way to get exponential returns to happiness that I know of. There are exponential curves in many places, like starting a startup in terms of money, but the diminish return of money -> happiness is so strong it ruins it. Meditation has no such tradeoff

I think refactoring your personality and attention to whatever you want (and discovering what you want) is a pretty analogous project to rewriting an operating system. It’s totally reasonably and still productive to invest 20,000hrs+ without diminishing returns It’s also similar in random surprising ways, like having knowledge of CS fundamentals like data structures, recursion etc ends up being very useful, because psychology tends to use similar data structure, or at least work well enough with them that you can treat them that way

when buddhists say attachment they mean tanha, a specific subtle clenching action. Attachment is the closest English word we have, but it’s a terrible translation. Getting attached to say a significant other or a job may vastly decrease clenching, esp if fomo is your vice this is why the idea of karma is important, which sort of terribly translates as “personality”. Maybe getting a big increase in say wealth increases the amount you clench, and it’s net bad for your valence. Or maybe it causes you to unclench, depends on your personality

I wouldn’t go so far as to say selflessness is impossible, but 100% of the most pro social people I know got there by believing open individualism in their bones. They think they’ll have to be you at some point and so they want your experience to be good I guess that’s selfless in a sense, but it’s not the normal way we think about selflessness

Samadhi — a wonderful high-sensory clarity concentration state — is better than just about anything else in life, is somewhat easy to train, has been well documented for thousands of years, and basically no one has felt it or knows what it is. I don’t understand how this happens Though it’s strange to say it’s better than other things because really it’s amplifying all parts of life. It’s like life goes from chronically undersalted to (temporarily) correctly salted. Like oh that’s what food should taste like

Interesting @slatestarcodex essay. It’s true that every longtime meditator I know personally (say 3000hrs+) has had to deal with various body issues, like gut health or abnormally bad RSI. All of them would say it’s worth it, but it does seem like a cost

astralcodexten.substack.com/p/are-woo-non-… Also most people deal with at least some body issues. While the meditating population definitely seem to have more, it’s hard to figure out the differential. Also they have far fewer “mind issues” eg no looping thoughts. So hard overall to get quantitative about it

Some bleak rough and speculative notes on ex-risk (extinction risk) vs s-risk (great suffering risk) with regards to ai and why I think alignment people should generally be more concerned about the latter than they are today

I rec skipping thread if you’re not in a good place rn for now let’s treat s-risk as “optimized suffering”. Causing the end of life and causing max suffering are fundamentally different operations. Most ways to cause the former can’t cause the latter. Climate change can’t really cause the latter bc it’s not “trying to do anything”

Clarity and well-being are nearly the same thing

It’s hard to have a beautiful and bad experience, and beauty is everywhere with high enough sensory clarity. High sensory clarity also leads to seeing the mechanism that turns pain to hurt (tanha/dukkha), which helps you avoid it I don’t think it’s an accident that depression makes you see the world as gray. I think your sensory clarity actually just falls dramatically along all sense doors. Same with health issues, viruses etc

Humanity should care more about exotic states of consciousness and the huge variety of trip reports as strange glimpses of the future

The universe only matters insofar as the qualia it renders. The space of qualia is unimaginably big and we won’t choose to stay where we are now We don’t know where we’ll be if things go well, but we know we won’t be on the tiny island of qualia most of us inhabit today. Luckily can choose to be temporarily visit one of many millions of other islands

The four noble truths are great, but no so great they break fallabalism. They’re theories not truths, and it’s good to hold them lightly like any other theory that could always be obsoleted. Some guy’s four noble but probably not noblest possible theories How much progress would there be in theories of gravity if took Newton’s (brilliant at the time) work and filled monasteries with people chanting thank you for the theory oh illuminous perfect one

The experiences vs things debate is a false dichotomy because there are only verbs no nouns. Frames of experience arise and pass and the world drops away and is new and different instantaneously later. Nouns are a low sensory clarity phenomenon better to think of it as fast-change experiences (eg a rollercoaster ride) and change-change experiences (buying a house). Thinking of it that way feels different than experiences vs things, and this way of thinking is closer to reflecting how things actually work

Interpretability is cool and fun and more people should consider working on it

https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1652389113637769217

The aliens are already here and we have full direct access to their brain, you get to start with all the tools and sensors neuroscience could only dream of having