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I've only read three self-help books that have dramatically changed my thinking: * How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now,

I've only read three self-help books that have dramatically changed my thinking: * How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format. * The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana. * Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration. While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.

kranner 6y ago
> I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana. Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?
- SirensOfTitan 6y ago
  > Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana? Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
  - kranner 6y ago
    Thanks. I similarly came up with a heuristic after reading Tor Nørretranders’ book The User Illusion. I remind myself that there is some part of my brain already paying attention constantly to the breath at the tip of the nose (or whatever the current meditation object is) because if a noxious stimulus presented there I would certainly become consciously aware of it. So all I have to do is ‘tune in’ to that part of my awareness. This works pretty well for me, and not surprisingly many meditation instructions use this metaphor of tuning a radio, but it didn’t make as much sense before I began to think of it in this way. I have also learned meditation mainly from reading.
    - SirensOfTitan 6y ago
      Ah that’s a wonderful heuristic, I’ll try next time I sit. Thanks for sharing. :)

kranner 6y ago

> I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana. Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?

SirensOfTitan 6y ago
> Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana? Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it’s sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn’t phrased the right way I’ve noticed I miss it.
- kranner 6y ago
  Thanks. I similarly came up with a heuristic after reading Tor Nørretranders’ book The User Illusion. I remind myself that there is some part of my brain already paying attention constantly to the breath at the tip of the nose (or whatever the current meditation object is) because if a noxious stimulus presented there I would certainly become consciously aware of it. So all I have to do is ‘tune in’ to that part of my awareness. This works pretty well for me, and not surprisingly many meditation instructions use this metaphor of tuning a radio, but it didn’t make as much sense before I began to think of it in this way. I have also learned meditation mainly from reading.
  - SirensOfTitan 6y ago
    Ah that’s a wonderful heuristic, I’ll try next time I sit. Thanks for sharing. :)