you can pretty much solve your own suffering (feel good ~all the time) by learning not to do phenomenological contractions and still have a ton of “personal work” to do, these two things aren’t in tension at all
I think doing the former makes the latter easier because you become much more impartial. it doesn’t really matter so much to you what you “discover about yourself” you’ll feel deep okayness / awesome either way. so you can impartially uncover and clean out and refactor
Aug 25 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
the jhanas are cool because they can show you in a week that you can be happy and whole right now whenever you want, and probably don't need all those things on your ten year plan to feel happy and whole eventually. the belief-plan-crisis they cause is as valuable as the joy
you don't need to be the kind of guy you think you need to be to feel happy and trying to be a kind of guy blocks the happiness and wholeness that underlies consciousness. the way to unconditional happiness is through digging not constructing and maintaining perfect structures
Aug 14 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
as far as I can tell most of the people who made it far (“succeeded”) in each of the three major ways of aiming for a happy life agree with each other
money/impressiveness/billionaires etc: it’s nice, convenient, but I’m stressed and it feels a bit hollow. This isn’t what you’re looking for. I’m a bit {less, more} happy than before I started, but also wouldn’t give up what I have. But also it was really hard to get, for relatively small change
family/kids: this is what evolution wanted us to do, and it rewards us for it. Not all days are good, but there’s a meaning there that was missing before, and in some subtle way I wasn’t fully alive before. If you’re chasing impressiveness consider settling down instead
meditation/wholeness practices: this is what you’re looking for there is no doubt about it. Everything you are searching for is connection and you cannot actually have it until you remove the disconnection, letting go of the sense of a separate self. Everything else is an attempt to do this but it’s only partial at best. I feel connected to everyone now just as a fundamental part of being, and I no longer need “meaning”. The way in which my life is good now wasn’t imaginable before, not because it’s so good it breaks the charts but rather I just care about different things than before, the way I judge my life has changed. But I’d trade one day of life now against my whole life before
ofc you can do more than one of these in a life (even all 3), and they all have different risk reward ratios and chance of succeeding at each. But while each group has some intra-group differences I think overall they’re surprisingly homogenous
also I think positive psychology should study this more formally and at larger scale, this is just what I’ve taken away from informally studying it myself and doing lots of causal interviews over the last 10yrs or so
Aug 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
the way to be charismatic is to not ask anything of anyone. The way to not ask anything is having happiness independent of conditions, so you don’t need anything else. The way to happiness independent of conditions is insight into sensory experience and dissolving solidities
you can try to not be needy when you feel bad but it’s hard to long term and it usually seeps out somehow — our body language sensors are really good. Whereas when you feel incredible, not being needy is the default, it’s effortless. Solving the needy problem is a valence problem
Aug 1 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
the english “attachment is the cause of suffering” I think is pretty accurate, but people assume it’s because “if you’re attached and you lose it, it’ll hurt”. But it’s not (just) that, it’s the attachment mental movement itself hurts, right now. Hurts like a headache does
if it were the former, the common response “I think getting attached is worth the pain” is totally reasonable. And for some normal social uses of “attached” (eg falling in love with a person or project) that’s totally good and reasonable
Jul 30 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I think there is actually a secret to happiness. It’s a phenomenological shift that makes happiness the default rather than rare. Sadly it’s hard to get and usually takes a while. But it’s a pretty full solution and obscure enough I think calling it a secret is reasonable
Technologically might make it easier though. The fact that we have a ~full solution is a big deal imo even if it’s a difficult full solution
Jul 8 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
my alliance isn’t really with buddhism, and I don’t feel like a buddhist. I just noticed happiness both feels good and correlates with everything I care about (energy, kindness, etc) so I searched for effective methods for dramatically upping it and found buddhism. I’m a happyist
Also the solution the Buddha found in the end (awakening) has been found by many other people and groups too. Rumi talks about it, Christian mystics talk about it, etc. It’s just a transition humans can go through, like puberty is. No one owns it, it’s be like owning puberty
Jul 3 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
it turns out feeling as good as you can imagine just as a sober waking baseline is actually pretty small compared to what comes after
it goes a lot further than most people are able to imagine before starting, because the ways it gets better are along dimensions it’s almost impossible to know about before starting. The ones most people know about are pretty easy to max out relatively early on
Jul 1 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I see power law charts when I close my eyes and I think I prob see the world too linearly
only need a few good friends for life, only one career success to carry everything, a few good food items your body likes to have a healthy diet, only one practice to have happiness anytime
probably takes a lot of searching for each of these things though
Jun 30 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
on the 2x2 of mostly driven by selfish motives vs altruistic and risk averse and ambitious, I’m extremely confident the selfish ambitious people should seek feeling amazing via internal change rather than external. The ceiling is so ridiculously higher. Other quadrants less clear
make startups bc companies are helpful to the economy and world and also makes your life a little better if it works out. But don’t start them because you want your life to be great. If you choose to focus on your own wellbeing do the thing that can actually 100x it
Jun 26 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
“I thought [meditator’s] experiences sounded like nihilism to me before I experienced it myself. It’s not that nothing matters anymore, it’s that everything is great”
Unconditional happiness doesn’t mean nothing matters it means no matter what happens you’re in surplus, attentive to every sensation arising in the moment but not shaken by any of them, bc you’ve trained to let them arise and pass unresisted
Jun 17 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
across almost every area i see (research, exercise, health, meditation, relationships) I think insight is undervalued and grinding overvalued. working hard is good but imo mostly bc it makes you more likely to discover insight. most things are like puzzles, series of s curves
meditation is a microcosm bc it's presented as the platonic ideal of grinding: sit and stare at a wall for 10yrs until enlightened. But it's the opposite, it's about understanding tension, why you're reifying a center, don't have stable attention, can't amplify sensations etc
Jun 9 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
like a third of women I’m close to dream of opening beautiful bookstore/cafes but have no concrete plans. american cities have too few inspiring spaces, and tokyo proves you can’t have too many beautiful cafes. how can the cafe dream to reality pipeline be easier
if I were running a city I’d make one of the top priories incubating beautiful places, like yc or something. A city would feels different if there are beautiful spaces (small grocery stores, cafes, etc) every 2 blocks
Jun 3 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
in thoughts, trying to have happier thoughts -> find there’s a source of felt joy in the body that is better than any thought -> find there is a source of joy underneath awareness that is better than anything that can arise in the body
positive mantras are the magnified version of thought joy, jhanas are the magnified version of body joy, and the third joy is always there but takes a lot of unclouding to see. No way to magnify or dim it
May 30 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I recommend barely having object permanence, even if it does mean losing things more often. Our baseline object permanence settings are wayyy too high. Turn your head after one get together and you’re over it and fully in the next present moment
The dogs have it right. Not holding onto things that aren’t here right now means you are fully present with whatever is here right now
and most things you accidentally lose won’t bother you bc you’ll have already forgotten about them
May 4 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
years ago when jhana started working I realized I’d never fully relaxed into pleasure. most pleasures are fleeting, and I’d learned to grasp at it when it showed up out of scarcity. It was healing to instead just let it soak into my body for hours, slowly letting it flow around
I’m sure other people learn how to go from feel good scarcity to surplus mindset in other ways, but for me I can’t imagine another way than jhana. The dose and length of time I needed feelingly abundantly good was a lot, hundreds of hours resting in it before I started to let go
Apr 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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
Feb 20 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
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
Feb 3 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
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
Jan 18 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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?
Dec 30, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
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
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
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