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Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is

Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, right? Except you will probably find that before long, instead of having your attention on the breath like you fully intended, your attention will be on some thoughts. Where did the thoughts come from? Were 'you' thinking them? Or did the thoughts just arise and steal your attention, despite YOU fully intending to be paying attention to the breath for the 10 minutes? What is then your relationship to 'your' thoughts?

visarga 5y ago
Yes, thoughts pop up on their own. The brain is a team made of a generator and a critic. They learn and work together. The generator is like a language model, it will make some contextual association or random jump. But then the critic allows to evaluate this fresh thought. Doing this multiple rounds before acting is necessary for reasoning. When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being. That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness. Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.

visarga 5y ago

Yes, thoughts pop up on their own. The brain is a team made of a generator and a critic. They learn and work together. The generator is like a language model, it will make some contextual association or random jump. But then the critic allows to evaluate this fresh thought. Doing this multiple rounds before acting is necessary for reasoning. When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being. That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness. Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.