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Yes. It's a reminder that there's a non-conceptual aspect to life—a way to be that doesn't involve categorizing or evaluating, just acting and experiencing. 'Bo

Yes. It's a reminder that there's a non-conceptual aspect to life—a way to be that doesn't involve categorizing or evaluating, just acting and experiencing. 'Body scan' meditation and breath watching are both great for this. It's like some deeper, unseen part of mind chooses at any given point whether to exist as that voice in your head, or your physical body. For me, exercising ambition and over-focusing on intellectual pursuits for too long made it so that I was pretty much exclusively identifying with the 'voice in my head.' It sounds like I'm describing some inexact fluffy sort of thing, but I have something very definite in mind with this description: my subjective experience is starkly different based on whether I'm in the physical or mental 'mode.' And this is not a special insight of my own; their are plenty of ancient and modern treatments of the problem of thinking you are your thoughts. And, I'm pretty sure that understanding how to move between these modes is a key aspect to cultivating 'flow' in programming (or other activities). I'm still relatively new to meditation (about 1.5 months regularly; over a year reading about it and doing it occasionally), but I've reaped definite benefits from the time I've put in. It feels like the descriptions in 'Flatland' of discovering there's a new dimension that you can move in: without meditating it was like I was constrained to endlessly following up whatever thoughts I started up, and now I'm getting better at simply stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive. This has been especially important for me since I'd had an injury related to using mouse/keyboard so that it became impossible to 'get out of my head' while using the computer—was in the polar opposite of 'flow' whenever on the computer. I spent a couple years like that, in one sense relieved since I understood rationally that I wasn't damaging myself at the computer anymore—but still having a terrible time at the computer because of past experiences with it. There were a number of things that went into improving this, but things didn't start reaallly getting good again until I started meditating. The feeling is like learning an instrument though: I can see myself slowly becoming capable of making music—but it takes time. I don't think I'm really all that much of a special case though. People are in their heads in an unpleasant way while coding because any number of things causes them anxiety: anything from finding yet another bug in your code to general unease from a built up habit of assessing your supposedly innate capacity as a programmer. If you have no concerns, you just act: it's just the code and the problem you're working on, everything else disappears, time disappears. If you can do it with the breath, you can do it with code. edit: for typos, expanded a couple parts.

icebraining 12y ago
I never really "got" meditation, so excuse for sounding tone deaf, but when you say "stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive", do you mean thinking about your thoughts¹? Or something different, not thoughts at all? I ask because I'm completely familiar with analyzing my own thoughts, especially when I'm having a small hypochondriac episode, and I don't understand why would meditation be necessary for that. On the other hand, if it's not thinking about thoughts, how would you describe it? ---- ¹ What Terry Pratchett describes as "Seconds Thoughts" :) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-the-everyday-thoughts-everyone-has-those-second http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-th...
- westoncb 12y ago
  Interesting quote—I like it. The 'Second Thoughts' definition is useful because it is the exact opposite of what you do in meditation. I think it would be valid to say that meditation is training in understanding what it really means to 'do nothing,' and that when you area REALLY doing nothing—everything is great. I see it like this: verbal/rational thought (typically involving the concept of yourself) arises in order to figure out how to change some aspect of your situation; with meditation you learn to understand "everything is okay, at least for the next 20 minutes," and thoughts melt away, you smell things and hear things and temperature becomes present, etc. Movies, books, people, food—you name it, can all be super rich and interesting when you are just doing this non-thinking, understanding there's nothing to do, letting life speak instead of talking over it. I think of it as training in discerning when you are 'talking over' your experience versus JUST experiencing. If you want some more, I wrote this very short story to exemplify how it is to be caught in the '2-dimensional plane' of believing that various forms of thought are your only possible 'actions,' while it's true that an utterly simple third dimension exists. https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 That story describes less informed ways of getting oneself to stop thinking. It's sort of like you are waving your hands wildly all the time and you'd like to stop, so you keep trying different types of hand waving in order to stop it—whereas what you really want is to just not do it, but you have to figure that out! If you're interested in trying it, and you've had any issues with mental health, and you're a complete beginner, I'd strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness/dp/0739358588 http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness...

icebraining 12y ago

I never really "got" meditation, so excuse for sounding tone deaf, but when you say "stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive", do you mean thinking about your thoughts¹? Or something different, not thoughts at all? I ask because I'm completely familiar with analyzing my own thoughts, especially when I'm having a small hypochondriac episode, and I don't understand why would meditation be necessary for that. On the other hand, if it's not thinking about thoughts, how would you describe it? ---- ¹ What Terry Pratchett describes as "Seconds Thoughts" :) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-the-everyday-thoughts-everyone-has-those-second http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-th...

westoncb 12y ago
Interesting quote—I like it. The 'Second Thoughts' definition is useful because it is the exact opposite of what you do in meditation. I think it would be valid to say that meditation is training in understanding what it really means to 'do nothing,' and that when you area REALLY doing nothing—everything is great. I see it like this: verbal/rational thought (typically involving the concept of yourself) arises in order to figure out how to change some aspect of your situation; with meditation you learn to understand "everything is okay, at least for the next 20 minutes," and thoughts melt away, you smell things and hear things and temperature becomes present, etc. Movies, books, people, food—you name it, can all be super rich and interesting when you are just doing this non-thinking, understanding there's nothing to do, letting life speak instead of talking over it. I think of it as training in discerning when you are 'talking over' your experience versus JUST experiencing. If you want some more, I wrote this very short story to exemplify how it is to be caught in the '2-dimensional plane' of believing that various forms of thought are your only possible 'actions,' while it's true that an utterly simple third dimension exists. https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 https://medium.com/@westoncb/don-t-worry-631ce63934c1 That story describes less informed ways of getting oneself to stop thinking. It's sort of like you are waving your hands wildly all the time and you'd like to stop, so you keep trying different types of hand waving in order to stop it—whereas what you really want is to just not do it, but you have to figure that out! If you're interested in trying it, and you've had any issues with mental health, and you're a complete beginner, I'd strongly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness/dp/0739358588 http://www.amazon.com/Full-Catastrophe-Living-Wisdom-Illness...