5 ms·

What's that choice's source? How do you 'do' it?

seventhtiger 5y ago
Think of how you can make a verbal conscious decision to learn how to ride a bike. Then you get on a bike, and you make a verbal conscious decision to keep your arms stable. Even though you made the choice, your arms won't obey you the first time. Because stabilizing limbs rides the line between a conscious and subconscious activity. But you keep making that choice, and eventually your arms obey you. With more practice, your arms obey a choice you haven't made verbally or consciously. You're riding a bike so of course you want your arms to be stable. The meaning of choice is not just the single incident of a conscious verbal decision. There's a meta choice, where a choice is made many times over many attempts, until the associated action becomes subconscious. That's the only way we can choose to drive, read, speak, ride a bike, swim, and so on. This extends to emotions. You only know you're angry after you've become angry. It feels like anger comes from somewhere outside of your control. Yet you can still choose to not be angry, even though you already failed. The more you choose not to be angry the less angry you would be. It also extends to thoughts. Harmless intrusive thoughts, or distracting useless thoughts, or painful thoughts, all of these pop in without choice. You can still practice exerting choice over a subconscious process you can't control. Even though thoughts come from no where, people who meditate often (pretty quickly too in my own case) exert control over that subconscious area and stop thoughts from even happening.
veidr 5y ago
It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them. This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first. Source: started meditating a few months ago.
- kingkawn 5y ago
  Who’s doing the seeing
- argentinian 5y ago
  If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?
  - rahoulb 5y ago
    The word "agency" is important there ... There have been experiments on split brain patients (where there Corpus Callosum has been severed, so their two hemispheres no longer communicate), that seem to imply that the self is more of a way of monitoring and understanding what's going on and tying it all together. For example, asking the subject, whispered in one ear, so only one hemisphere receives the request - "can you get me a can of Coke from the vending machine please, I'm really thirsty". Then when the subject returns, asking the other ear (and hence the other hemisphere) "why did you get that can?" - to which the subject replied "I thought I would need a drink on my way home" - in effect filling in an explanation for the "black box" behaviour their body was expressing.
  - hnfong 5y ago
    The only thing that matters is whether "you" identify with "it".
  - veidr 5y ago
    Well, that becomes the interesting question. :) I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name). He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that. As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me". When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me. What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts". To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix. For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time. Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol. What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word). It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.

Think of how you can make a verbal conscious decision to learn how to ride a bike. Then you get on a bike, and you make a verbal conscious decision to keep your arms stable. Even though you made the choice, your arms won't obey you the first time. Because stabilizing limbs rides the line between a conscious and subconscious activity. But you keep making that choice, and eventually your arms obey you. With more practice, your arms obey a choice you haven't made verbally or consciously. You're riding a bike so of course you want your arms to be stable. The meaning of choice is not just the single incident of a conscious verbal decision. There's a meta choice, where a choice is made many times over many attempts, until the associated action becomes subconscious. That's the only way we can choose to drive, read, speak, ride a bike, swim, and so on. This extends to emotions. You only know you're angry after you've become angry. It feels like anger comes from somewhere outside of your control. Yet you can still choose to not be angry, even though you already failed. The more you choose not to be angry the less angry you would be. It also extends to thoughts. Harmless intrusive thoughts, or distracting useless thoughts, or painful thoughts, all of these pop in without choice. You can still practice exerting choice over a subconscious process you can't control. Even though thoughts come from no where, people who meditate often (pretty quickly too in my own case) exert control over that subconscious area and stop thoughts from even happening.

veidr 5y ago

It's just something that happens once you learn to see the thoughts themselves arising, rather than feeling like you are thinking them. This occurs automatically, once you start meditating, typically within just a couple weeks even for those people (like me) who "don't get it" at first. Source: started meditating a few months ago.

kingkawn 5y ago
Who’s doing the seeing
argentinian 5y ago
If choices and thoughts just happen, then what kind of agency does the self have?
- rahoulb 5y ago
  The word "agency" is important there ... There have been experiments on split brain patients (where there Corpus Callosum has been severed, so their two hemispheres no longer communicate), that seem to imply that the self is more of a way of monitoring and understanding what's going on and tying it all together. For example, asking the subject, whispered in one ear, so only one hemisphere receives the request - "can you get me a can of Coke from the vending machine please, I'm really thirsty". Then when the subject returns, asking the other ear (and hence the other hemisphere) "why did you get that can?" - to which the subject replied "I thought I would need a drink on my way home" - in effect filling in an explanation for the "black box" behaviour their body was expressing.
- hnfong 5y ago
  The only thing that matters is whether "you" identify with "it".
- veidr 5y ago
  Well, that becomes the interesting question. :) I started meditation about 5 months ago, via the Waking Up app by Sam Harris (after reading the book of the same name). He is extremely keen on this notion that "self is an illusion" and keeps trying to help us app-users see that. As a n00b, I can't answer your question with any authority. To me, in my personal practice, the evaluator of these thoughts still feels like "me". When I intentionally set out to think about a problem, iterate on possible solutions, pick an approach — also me. What I really feel subjectively, after daily meditation practice for a few months, is that the human mind is made up of a whole bunch of sub-entities that can produce "thoughts". Words, images, a visceral sense of forboding, or joy, or anticipation — all "thoughts". To paraphrase the famous trilogy, there are hoodoos in the matrix. For me, this was weird and kind of unnerving to realize. At the same time, it's only based on my subjective experience — and I have already proven that my subjective experience is an unreliable guide, because a lot of what I previously felt like were the authentic thoughts of myself, which I, myself, me, was thinking, were in fact just some quasi-random crap thrown up by the various hoodoos in there, which had just happened to bubble up to my consciousness at that time. Anyway I am pretty sure that many people have spent their entire lives trying to answer your question, lol. What I can say is only that, the trying of it is pretty interesting and enlightening (at least in the prosaic everyday sense of the word). It can also be a bit disorienting and even alarming. So the OP is surely right that some people are probably better off not meditating, although I feel confident that most people should probably try it.