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I've done a lot of meditation work over the years. I started with simple stillness and visualization exercises, and progressed to moving meditations. Eventually

I've done a lot of meditation work over the years. I started with simple stillness and visualization exercises, and progressed to moving meditations. Eventually I started doing sophisticated chakra work and could manipulate emotion at will. I find it very easy to call up a state of profound mental calm if I ever want one, one came to me as I was reading the piece, like putting on an old glove. I can see how it's easy for someone who spent much of their lives dealing with chatter could fetishize calm once they've gotten a taste of it, but like being pervasively, effusively happy / calm / cheerful all the time, (another thing I've done) it eventually gets old. Chatter is how the mind works. Staying completely in the present all the time means you're just not exercising the part of your brain that learns. I can turn it off if I want to. But I don't. I liken it to being a dog. Dogs, and other animals, are excessively present. They don't have intellectual thoughts because they are biologically incapable of them. They're incapable of even having awareness that intellectualism even exists. Being aphasic is basically erasing a part of you that makes you human. Worse, you don't even have the awareness that you lost it. With our travails and struggles comes our humanity, whitewashing over our mental chatter or our emotions relegates you to a baser existence. You're "happier," but you haven't really evolved to be better in any way.

Senderman 10y ago
Yours is a point of view I've rarely heard. It's quite inspiring. I suppose I'm encouraged that you've reduced 'chatter' and its avoidance to something that can be managed.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  I'd say it's nice to have a 'baseline' that you can operate off of. Life has never for me been so stressful and worrisome that I needed to regress back to a base point where I feel perfectly at ease with all outcomes, honestly more basic stuff like threat modeling at an intellectual level has been more than sufficient. I'm not going to say that all my meditation has been useless, but there's definitely a diminishing point of returns there where you need increasing amounts of refinement before you can really distinguish differences. Stoicism is really "good enough" for most purposes. It's like buying $500 whiskey when you can't even tell the difference between $100 whiskey and $200 whiskey, they both taste smooth. Meditation techniques take time and effort to perfect just like anything else, and eventually you start needing more time to move the needle. At some point you just want to get back to the world and accomplish things.

Senderman 10y ago

Yours is a point of view I've rarely heard. It's quite inspiring. I suppose I'm encouraged that you've reduced 'chatter' and its avoidance to something that can be managed.

vinceguidry 10y ago
I'd say it's nice to have a 'baseline' that you can operate off of. Life has never for me been so stressful and worrisome that I needed to regress back to a base point where I feel perfectly at ease with all outcomes, honestly more basic stuff like threat modeling at an intellectual level has been more than sufficient. I'm not going to say that all my meditation has been useless, but there's definitely a diminishing point of returns there where you need increasing amounts of refinement before you can really distinguish differences. Stoicism is really "good enough" for most purposes. It's like buying $500 whiskey when you can't even tell the difference between $100 whiskey and $200 whiskey, they both taste smooth. Meditation techniques take time and effort to perfect just like anything else, and eventually you start needing more time to move the needle. At some point you just want to get back to the world and accomplish things.