Not a no-no at all as far as I know. It was explicitly recommended in The Mind Illuminated. It just needs to be an alarm that you'll hear when it's done so you don't have to devote any attention to it, you just focus on meditating until it goes off.

I recommend The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. It's a brilliant book, see the reviews on amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0990847705/).

"The mind illuminated" is a very good introduction to meditation. It is unique in the formal system he used to make sense of the various levels of practice. Very practical and low-BS.

I can recommend The Mind Illuminated by culadasa. He has a PHD in neuroscience and gives you a very comprehensive framework of how the mind works (with focus on attention) and what kind of improvements meditation brings.

> if you've ever tried to do some mindfulness meditation, you realize we're not very good at it.

Well that's the point, to get better at it. It helps to have some good instructions; the book The Mind Illuminated is fantastic.

The Mind Illuminated book. It's new and is pretty quickly becoming a go-to recommendation for meditation how-to for lots of various practitioners.

Another interesting book about meditation is The Mind Illuminated:

http://themindilluminated.com/

by Culadasa (John Yates):

http://culadasa.com/about/

He has both a scientific and a meditator background. Not checked the book out in depth yet, but going to.

I read that and its good. The meditation subreddit say that "The Mind Illuminated" is similar but better (I haven't read it yet).

Another great book is The Mind Illuminated, which IMO is as comprehensive and detailed a meditation book as you're likely to find. Plus it's written for a pragmatic Western audience and doesn't feature the sorts of spiritual trappings that tend to turn people off.

Meditation works well for me. The trick is you need to be consistent and patient. Try out the Calm app (my favorite), Headspace, or read "The Mind Illuminated" and start practicing daily.

Erm, neither was the author of The Mind Illuminated. It’s literally just a textbook for how to meditate for western audiences.

I’m not sure how you got that from my comment. Not even sure what you mean by that last sentence. I’m sorry that even mentioning a substance had you jump to such conclusions.

It’s well worth the effort IMHO.

If you need more detail on technique I have found The Mind Illuminated to be a super good book on the subject.

I can thoroughly recommended the book "The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness", by John Yates.

A pragmatic guide, that's been mentioned on HN a few times, is 'The Mind Illuminated' [0]. The subreddit [1] is a great resource as well.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Complete-Meditation-...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/

> I followed the instructions from John Yates' "The Mind Illuminated" book

Can confirm: this is a very clearly written book. It reads like a reference manual for meditation.

You need to know how to progress. The book The Mind Illuminated which has allready recommended here helps with this. One commenter in another thread on hn allready practised for years, that book got him further.

The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa. I find it the textbook on meditation and it has largely transformed my life.

> see the book The Mind Illuminated.

I am at around stage 3 just now.... Nowhere near enough to stop my thoughts but they are definitely calmer.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’ve probably meditated for a lot longer than you. I highly recommend The Mind Illuminated.

Edit: oops sorry for actually clarifying why I may be an expert on this subject

To me, there is no better guide to meditation from start to advanced than Culadasa’s book “The Mind Illuminated”. I suggest it to nearly everyone I can—it breaks down the meditation process into concrete stages, skills to practice, and issues that may arise along the way.

I’d heavily recommend the book: The Mind Illuminated—I consider it the training manual on meditation and it considerably pushed my practice forward.

"The Mind Illuminated" ( https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Complete-Meditation-... ) is very good, and contains all you need for your practice.

The author is both a long term meditator and used to be a neuroscience professor. The book teaches meditation in a stage by stage way which is very easy to follow.

Another excellent book is "Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook"
(https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Bliss-Beyond-Meditators-H...).

For those interested in learning more, The Mind Illuminated is by far the best book I've come across on the topic. It's an extremely systematic college level manual for learning how to meditate. The author has a PhD in physiology, has been meditating for 40 years, taught neuroscience for years, and speaks Pali and Sanskrit, so he's able to read and interpret the original Buddhist texts. These combined allow him to teach with a unique depth and precision.

Take a look at the Amazon reviews, and ask yourself if you've ever seen anything so highly rated: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

I hope you find it as valuable as I did :)

I'm not the person you replied to, but you might want to check out The Mind Illuminated by John Yates, a modern meditation guide (based on Buddhist practices) that delves deeply into mind's systems of attention & awareness.

The mind illuminated by culladasa is a very comprehensive book that guides you step by step through all meditation stages

Yes, but part of the point, at least in the Buddhist tradition, is that those thoughts are just another phenomenon you're experiencing. Do a lot of the right kind of practice, and you can get it to stop, while still maintaining a high level of conscious awareness. E.g. see the book The Mind Illuminated.

Try reading and following "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates. It will help you identify when you are ruminating and not engage with it, which is a good start. It will also teach you to just sit with it when you want to engage with your addictions (which you probably do for escapism, to distract yourself from your thoughts). If you learn that thoughts are just thoughts and you don't have to engage with them, it will diminish the appeal of addictions, which is another good thing.
Also, seeing a good therapist is also a very good idea.

You can look up "The Mind Illuminated" by Yates (Culadasa) and Immergut.

It is completely devoid of run-of-the-mill pseudo-spiritual stuff, and consists of practical advice that you can follow.

It is a complete guide that provides step-by-step instructions.

I would highly recommend The Mind Illuminated as a solid instruction manual for beginners who want to start meditating at home.

http://a.co/61TjGpW

For me, daily meditation has helped reduce my anxiety and has made me generally a more happier person. A book i recommend is The Mind Illuminated. It’s a step by step guide into meditation.

Are you aware of the model of the mind system from The Mind Illuminated (a book that teaches meditation)?

First, I have to clarify concepts. There is a consciousness created by the mind. It's the place where sensory input is experienced. It's also the place where thoughts are experienced. It's basically the screen that allows the different parts of the mind system to communicate.

Then, there's the consciousness talked about in this article. It's a more primordial quality.

Now, that model of the mind system says that attention and awareness are the two modes of the mind. Consciousness as the screen of experience is created by the mind. Perception is created by the mind as well.

I've found that meditation has also helped me. I read several books on the subject of meditation but found "The Mind Illuminated" to be the best.

I think what you mean by dark night is the last chapter in The Mind Illuminated.

Being red pilled with the literature doesn't make you immune to the "dark night"

I'd like to recommend "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa John Yates. Besides the elephant analogy, there is much actionable advice on meditation to be found in that book.

'The Mind Illuminated' by John Yates.
Meditate!

I'll also add Ecclesiastes - there's perennial wisdom in that old book, and it doesn't demand a lick of faith.

To see what the Buddha saw, leading my brain to do the reassessment that causes freedom from suffering. I meditate daily and study related books like The Mind Illuminated.

There are many kinds of meditation. Three that I know of: (i) focusing on the sensations of your breath, either in your nostrils or your abdomen, while maintaining peripheral awareness; (ii) practicing feeling "loving kindness" towards people; (iii) visualizing complex shapes. I'm not sure what you mean by "trace-like", but I suspect that it would describe some forms of meditation but not others.

I believe that "mindfulness" is also used in more than one way, and as a result may or may not refer to a kind of meditation.

I have a book "The Mind Illuminated", which discusses meditation (i) in great detail, and suggests a self-check as you begin meditating, though with different steps than HALT.

Disclaimer: I know very little about meditation, and some of this might be wrong. But it's certainly complicated, and words refer to many different things.

I second this and will add a recommendation for Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, which is legally and freely available here http://integrateddaniel.info/book/ It really has the flavor of "meditation for hackers," whereas The Mind Illuminated's flavor seems more "meditation for engineers."

"The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates proved to be exactly what I needed to start practicing meditation.

A lot of us consider our work a craft and spend lifetime perfecting tools. Unfortunately, we neglect the most important tool we have - our mind. It turns out we can improve our focus by consistent practice (and that's only one of many benefits of meditation).

Opening chapters of this book provide a basic model of awareness & focus, which demonstrates that we are rarely in control of our thoughts. I found it fascinating. The rest of book provides a well defined path to train and improve working of mind through introspection.

Although I could find no actual credentials for author (he claims to be neuroscientist), his observations and explanations are so far very consistent and consistent with my own. Also, religion and mysticism are absent from the book, except when referencing traditional practices.

BTW I've also recently read Deep Work. It's a fantastic book and it made me change some habits, but the style turned me off. I did not enjoy cherry-picked anecdotal 'proofs' and persistent convincing.

HIGHLY recommended. This summary got me started on a long journey - after 3 years of off and on meditation with apps, reading this article, and then MCTB made meditation one of the most exciting and important parts of my daily routine.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-...

Also highly recommended: The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned already, but one thing I've found mentioned again and again in various meditation forums as an aid for people struggling with difficult feelings brought up by meditation is "metta" meditation, which translates roughly to "loving-kindness". Through one way or another (often repeated mantras are used), the meditation aims to generate feelings of love and goodwill towards both the meditator and towards others. This compassion can then be called on if difficult feelings arise (and my understanding is they often do at some point).

My understanding is that insight meditation practices in particular, like Vipassana mentioned in the article, are especially likely to bring up difficult feelings. But if one has some sort of "safe container" they can put those feelings within, then they have the opportunity to integrate the experience, and they can grow from that. It's much like being able to recount a traumatic experience in a setting where you feel safe and listened to; it can allow for real healing. But there _needs_ to be some safe context for the pain to be felt. I feel like I read a lot of stories about people trying to dig up as much "insight" as they can, but without giving thought to how they might be able to integrate them (both with meditation and also psychedelics).

For anyone interested in this stuff, I've found Radical Self Acceptance by Tara Brach to be a really great source of both guided metta meditations as well as discussions about balancing "Seeing"/"Insight" and having the safe emotional container for experiences. I would also highly recommend The Mind Illuminated, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, as a great general textbook on meditation, which also gives special attention to uncovering Insight in a way that can be safely integrated.

I strongly recommend the book 'The Mind Illuminated'. It is written by a neuroscientist who is also an expert practitioner of meditation. That said, it is far less casual than apps like headspace; the principle goal of the book is not to develop increased focus or productivity, but to develop meditation to discover insights into the nature of consciousness through direct experience.

The book does a great job of highlighting many common misunderstandings and pitfalls of beginner mediators in a practical and mostly down to earth way.

I use it with an App called Insight Timer that allows me to track the time I have put into meditating with satisfying statistics and graphs.

First, I did a few random 'guided meditations' off youtube (Sam Harris has a popular one) and discovered that I enjoyed it.

After that, I've been enjoying The Mind Illuminated, by John Yates, and I think others on hackernews will as well. It doesn't bother with a lot of the eastern spirituality aspects, but instead focuses on how to become good at meditating and find the most benefits from it.

That verse is worthless for atheists, but the first sentence is actually usable. How we experience life, how we feel is strongly influenced by the labels we attach to our experiences. Maybe meditation can help you, no god needed. Check out "The mind illuminated", this book gets recommended in pretty much every thread on hn about meditation and for good reasons.

Maybe not A book, but some books that helped me change my behavior just a little bit.

Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five - if you're thinking of having children or have young children already. This book gives some good insight on possible, data-driven ways to raise a happy and smart kid. I currently have a newborn and have altered some ways I behave around her. It also helps to think about how you were raised, and if that impacted the way you are.

The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness - if you're into meditation, I think this is the book to get. I started out with Headspace and this book takes it to the next level.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life - This was an entertaining book on how Scott Adams failed and succeeded. He gives some practical tips on what he did to get to where he is. Of course, there is survivorship bias, but I found some of it helpful.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism - People aren't born Charismatic. You can practice it.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It - A book about negotiation. I used to hate negotiating. Heck I still do. While I might not use the exact tactics outlined in the book, it helped me realize that I should try to negotiate more. And it might have helped me to get good deals or better salary just by asking.

The Mind Illuminated by John Yates (aka Culadasa) helped me a lot on how to structure my practice and how to deal with specific issues arising during meditation. I also find it quite well-written.

It's good to point out there are many different types of meditation, as some work better than others, depending on the individual. However, this article doesn't seem to be advocating Vipassana, rather, it states: "Meditation is all about being aware of how your body feels and the thoughts that go through your head without judging or getting caught up in them. Often, this is done by focusing on a certain part of your body, like the breath or your feet, legs, arms, hands and chest etc. At the end of the day, what you’re aiming for is to keep bringing your attention back to what you’re focusing on, everytime you notice your mind has drifted off."

The book is called The Mind Illuminated, and is an absolutely fantastic book on meditation. Super cheap too: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

The go-to resource that is usually suggested is The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. I found it to be a very nice tutorial-like guide to meditation with hardly any spiritual/religious bullshit, and it breaks it down into stages so you get some idea of where you are at and what progress you are making (even though progress is not really something you should be focusing on with this).

The introductory course on the Headspace app I also found good but I think it is better to not stay on it beyond that.

If your thoughts keep you awake sometimes I think you would definitely benefit greatly from this.

What I was talking about in the previous post is two topics. So, it depends what you're looking for.

There are tons of books and meditation courses. It depends what suits your style. eg, The Mind Illuminated https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati... is the most popular meditation book right now. There is even a subreddit dedicated to it. However, it is quite the read, guiding as one progresses, mirroring how a teacher would do it.

Culadasa, who made The Mind Illuminated, is working on another book that goes over the second topic I was diving into (like Noting Meditation). It is incomplete with no eta. It would be a 102 book for after one finishes The Mind Illuminated.

There are other resources on the second topic, but right now both topics are ideally taught with a teacher, especially the second topic, so progress can be aided and verified.

What goal do you have? I can possibly write a skinny as to what to look at and where to go to achieve that goal, including providing more resources.

Also, just in case you do not know CBT, with a good therapist, is, I believe, the only kind of therapy that works well on depression. CBT takes from the techniques in the topics above, and then boils them down into a light version that can be worked through at an accelerated rate.

I’m slowly reading through this book, and I agree that it’s really, really great. I disagree, however, that this means one should “delete all these apps”. I’ve tried the Headspace and 10% Happier, and I think they’re great introductions for anyone who might not be ready to absorb the simple-but-not-at-all-simple language of The Mind Illuminated. It seems that perhaps you’ve forgotten that each of us is on a path, that it’s perfectly fine if this path is different for everyone, and that there is no end to the path outside of death or loss of awakening; certainly not “I finished this cool book”. As someone else has already pointed out, there’s quite a bit of irony in your commentary.

Advanced Zen practitioners most definitely do report what many would call spiritual experiences. The difference is they let those experiences go instead of chasing them or attaching much significance to them.

See for example the later chapters of "The Mind Illuminated", or the excellent "Science of Enlightenment" audio talk by Shinzen Young.

I agree that it's difficult to get to the core practical side of these things. Buddhism and related religions/philosophies have had a lock on meditation for so long that it can be hard to disentangle the real stuff from the stuff that got made up along the way.

So when you reach for The Mind Illuminated, which is a 400 page book, and trivialize the 390 pages of good pragmatic instructions on improving concentration and insight skills because you read 10 pages of spiritual mumbo-jumbo, you're missing a powerful opportunity.

The fact is that if you sit quietly and pay attention to your breath for a couple hours a day, some very transformative stuff will eventually start happening all on its own. No books or religion is required. But as a society, we mostly aren't willing to do that because of attitudes like that displayed in your post. We're making progress, though. Brains of advanced practitioners are being put in fMRIs with surprising results, and things are happening slowly. My point was that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater in the name of being good scientists.

Check out the miserable fate of "Culadasa" (author of the Mind Illuminated) if you want to see what kind of Midas touch situation can come of meditation without the companion practise of virtue, particularly restraint. e: (Midas because the guy claimed to be so "enlightened" and "living in the moment" that he lost the ability to worry about say, other people's feelings, right and wrong, causing harm etc. Acted then in ways that caused his disgrace he is now isolated, leaving his very-much-extant sensual longings starved.)

> What/where are the results from those thousands years of mindfulness? If the practice has an impact surely we should be able to see some things at a society level, or at least in some individuals who are particularly good at it.

Oh man, I can't tell you how much it hurts me to hear this. But I get where you're coming from.

It's hard because with mindfulness and meditation there's nothing to sell and nothing to show for it. All you have is your own inner peace. And you can't just give it away, you have to teach how to get there, and it's a long and arduous process that most people just give up on.

So I guess what I'm saying is I take issue with "surely." It's not actually true. The practice has a major impact -- an earth-shattering, mind-expanding impact on one's life -- but because of the inability to "prove" it works or "make" someone do it, people tend to write it off.

If you're more interested in what mindfulness is about you can check out the book The Mind Illuminated. It's an alright book, written for the serious secular meditator, (even though the author isn't secular.) There's also Mindfulness in Plain English.

Here's to hoping that you're able to see past your skepticism and learn a little bit about these potentially life-changing tools. All the best man.

I suspect a better place to start is one of the excellent books on mindfulness meditation that's available now.

The Mind Illuminated by John Yates is the one I see recommended the most, and it's helped me tremendously. It goes through ten stages, from novice to very advanced. I'm still close to the beginning, but the instructions in the first several chapters have helped me make far more progress than I ever had before.

The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young is also quite good, with more of an emphasis on insight rather than concentration meditation. There's also the classic Mindfulness in Plain English.

I do use one app. It lets me set a countdown timer, and plays a quiet gong when time is up. That's it.

I had always had some kind of anxiety or ocd for as long as I can remember. I'd searched for various ways to deal with it but only discovering meditation really worked for me.

After meditating for 6 months every day (starting with 5 minutes daily, ending with 20-30) I've completely got rid of it. A nice side effect was that I got to be a happier person overall (though that wasn't ever a problem for me), and learned to deal with any kind of stress whatsoever.

I'll happily recommend the, oh so often mentioned on hn, book "the mind illuminated" it really is great to start with: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

Recently I haven't been meditating as much as I'd like to unfortunately (I'm trying to get back to it), but the effects are lasting nevertheless. And I still know how to calm myself in a matter of minutes or get more distanced to the situation.

>then writing off the rest as spiritual mumbo-jumbo

Because a lot of it _is_ spiritual mumbo-jumbo.

The books "The Mind Illuminated" and "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" occasionally get recommended on here and are pretty mainstream books, supposedly backed by "brain science" and written by two PhDs. Let me give an excerpt from "The Mind Illuminated":

"The first practice involves cultivating the so-called “higher knowledges of the mundane type.” These are:
1. The “higher powers,” which are said to allow a yogi to perform miracles such as walking on water, or walking through walls. [...] 4. Knowing the minds of others, which is a form of telepathy. 5. Recollecting past lives"

And this isn't presented as a "oh, here's this historical context", it's presented without any real comment next to the jhanas.

Or, a nice bit in "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha", talking about pyschic powers:

"On the other hand, it does seem to be possible through powerful intent, strong concentration ability, appreciation of interdependence and careful experimentation to manipulate what we might call “this world”,as well as those in it, in very unusual and profound ways. Yes, I am referring to such things as telekinesis, mind control, reading other peoples thoughts, pyromancy, and all of that. The more you get your concentration and insight trips together and the more you look into the magical aspect of things, the more you will learn about what I will call the magical laws of the universe and how to use your will to manipulate it."

You know why people are skeptical of things like "awakening"? Because it's sold in the same breath as all the religious parts, making it impossible to discern which is what. If the cost of getting to 'the deep parts' means having to not dismiss such obvious bullshit like pyromancy, I think society will do fine with such 'disservice'.

I spent around 7 years at 30 mins/day - I was happy with it there, it was more of a casual thing for me at that time. Then I read some books, starting with The Mind Illuminated, and increased to 1hr/day over 4-5 months.

I find the act of effort or willpower for me is starting to meditate in the first place. Once I'm meditating, 60 mins doesn't require any more discipline than 30 mins, in fact it feels better.

Very interesting that you point to a Meditation book (The Mind Illuminated) and a Stoic book (A Guide to the Good Life).

I've read both, and I like both philosophies. While they both share similarities (non attachment, living in the present), it seems that in Vipasana you wouldn't try to get rid of a bad thouhgt by using your rationality. You would just observe it.

While Stoicism demands engaging rationality to overcome the emotion or bad thought.

Have you thought on how to reconcile the two? This is something I've been pondering for a while.

Just to provide an additional data point, I've sought relief from anxiety in meditation, failed, and then found great relief in cognitive-behavioral therapy. You're exactly right in that what's needed sometimes is conventional help from psychologists.

A few years ago, I delved again into meditation, this time more traditional Buddhist ones. I can't say emphatically enough that there is some deep knowledge there. Mindfulness (i.e. cultivating stable attention toward internal & external stimuli) is just the tip of the iceberg.

Like you, I found the expanded sensory stream provided by mindfulness training to be somewhat overwhelming. Imho, what's necessary to work with it fruitfully are: 1) developing the capacity of non-abiding, or not attaching/identifying too much with the flow of mental events, 2) training the unconscious mind to competently manage one's attention & awareness, so that you don't have constantly "pilot" your self.

Two books I've found indispensable are:
The Mind Illuminated - John Yates, and
The Rinzai Zen Way - Meido Moore

Of course, there's no substitute for a good teacher. Just be aware that there are many charlatans & New Age types who aren't so helpful. Good luck!

The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa

It’s like the missing manual for your mind.

I agree with you that there are at least 2 classes of "wants," but I would say the distinction is way more subtle than you think. For one thing, when it comes to my own motivations it's usually completely unreasonable to take myself at face value, so why would I take others at face value? Of course you should take care not to treat people like children, but that doesn't mean they understand themselves.

The best explanation I've seen of this, at least psychologically, is from The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. He says we are in control of our intentions, and nothing else. (Although I would say that language is also misleading, because people are sometimes not very good at distinguishing false intentions that are generated unconsciously.) The right intention, perhaps repeated persistently enough, is what leads not only to action but also to internal expressions of "willpower" or effort. Right intentions are not "good intentions," where you mean for good things to happen. A right intention is directing your focus to the thing that helps you most in whatever you're trying to do.

It's certainly possible to never notice any of this, especially if you don't take up activities that make the process more obvious. If you lift weights, for example, it's easy to notice all the effort that a set takes and think "I did that." In reality most of your control over the set was exerted before you even started. I think this explains the utility of many spiritual practices like meditation and prayer.

>Erm, neither was the author of The Mind Illuminated. It’s literally just a textbook for how to meditate for western audiences.

Now you're coming across like you haven't read the very book that you recommend.

>I’m not sure how you got that from my comment. Not even sure what you mean by that last sentence. I’m sorry that even mentioning a substance had you jump to such conclusions.

Reread the comment I replied to.

Two pieces of advice:

- Getting easily distracted is normal. Don't set a goal of never getting distracted: it's unrealistic and counterproductive. I've spent hundreds of hours meditating, and still get distracted (albeit more briefly). Instead, feel good when you notice you're distracted. The goal is to train yourself to notice and return to the sensation sooner, with positive feedback.

- Don't try to block out everything except what you're meditating on. That should be your main focus, but you should let yourself be aware of other things in the background.

The Mind Illuminated has some good practical advice in the early chapters. I can't vouch for the later chapters.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

"Billions of digitized thoughts are transferred between humans every hour of every day, more than the neural messages within any of our individual brains." - this one is quite interesting as a kind of objective measurment (density of information exchange?). According to that conceptual framework in which "consciousness is simply a process of information exchange" (I took it from Culadasa's "The Mind Illuminated", but it's probably much wider) one could thnk in terms of "phase", which level of consciousness dominates.

Several people in the thread have already recommended meditation. I’m going to join them.

If you’re already doing therapy, consider complementing it with meditation. Meditation, if done right, can be equivalent to years of therapy.

The benefits are great, and for your situation the most relevant are reduced/eliminated anxiety, more willpower, energy, clarity (to see through depression for example); but there many others.

However, there’s a catch: meditation is hard. It requires consistent effort and dedication, just like any practice involving a complex skill (e.g., going to the gym or swimming pool).

For a completely secular practice, I’d recommend “The Mind Illuminated” by John Yates [1], a neuroscientist and a master meditator, whose aim with the book was to create a modern manual for meditation by making old Buddhist teachings accessible to an average westerner. The book is a synthesis of those teachings complemented with both his experience as a master meditator /and/ as a neuroscience Ph.D. This means that along with detailed instructions on how to actually meditate the book contains theoretic chapters explaining in popular scientific terms how your brain works and what meditation has to do with it, by first introducing a simple model, and then gradually building upon it as you progress through the book and develop your skill.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

I try to spend 45 minutes a day on meditation (as recommended in The Mind illuminated), though I probably average closer to 25. You are unlikely to get anything useful done in 25 - 45 minutes of side project time.

A side project is going to take a long time especially as your time on it is likely to be split up a lot more - so effectively far more context switching. All the other activities (except meditation) can be done more as a one time activity.

(I have started multiple side projects, but then I get busy with other aspects of my life and they get forgotten about).

Yeah, it's really just about having full control of your thoughts. Here's an excerpt from Culudasa's The Mind Illuminated:

"You enter Stage Ten with all the qualities of śamatha: effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. At first these qualities immediately fade after the meditation has ended. But as you continue to practice, they persist longer and longer between meditation sessions. Eventually they become the normal condition of the mind."

As for the gamma wave correlation, my guess is that the adept meditator is actually taking in everything that goes on around them (due to powerful mindfulness). While the layman is probably just thinking about what they'll have for dinner as they navigate the world.

As someone else has mentioned in the thread, the book Learned Optimism is all about this. I have also found learning meditation from the book The Mind Illuminated to be helpful. You could also check out CBT, and/or the writings of Albert Ellis.

Fundamentally, you will need to learn to let go of your negative perspective. One thing that helped me with this is realizing that the facts of reality are one thing, and how I feel about them are another. These are entirely orthogonal, and rewiring yourself to react differently to things is very doable, especially if you realize that your negative reactions are not helpful.

I was referring to the "dark night" Dr Daniel Ingram expounds upon in his writings (which I'm familiar with) and is referred to in the article. I haven't read The Mind Illuminated, so I'm not sure if it's the same thing.

Regardless, there is no such thing as "red pilled" when it comes to all of this, and nobody who engages in intense meditation is immune. I went through it once and that was quite enough.

For me in 2019, it is learning to get started to write and just write.

Ideas to long form content that is fully developed, fully formed and fully proofchecked content is an extremely laborious process.

PG had a tweet out once ... just write ... publish or not publish is secondary. (something like that). I tried to implement and do that now.

Just beginning to write can be learned easily in an hour and the return on effort is, IMHO, fantastic. It can commercially be pretty useful but the mental clarity itself makes it worth it.

The second is meditation ... read The Mind Illuminated ... just the first stage (the author lays out a lot of progressive experience). Jump straight to the first stage chapter and just do it and repeat! I don't even try to progress further in practice ... it's pretty tough! The first stage is itself worth it.

'The Mind Illuminated' by Culadasa aka John Yates is an excellent guide.

It takes you gently through 10 stages, from just beginning all the way up to Enlightenment (for some definition of Enlightenment). It thoroughly covers all bases without any mumbo jumbo.

It does however require you to ramp up your practice to at least an hour daily if you want to make the most of it. Personally I found this a little daunting at first, but now that I 'get it' I am actually really motivated to put in the time and I am getting a lot out of it.

I don't know much about tummo but I am working my way through The Mind Illuminated, a book on a type of mindfulness meditation that gets into pretty advanced levels, so I can answer from that perspective.

The book goes through several models of consciousness, but one is "moments of consciousness." In each of those moments, you could have your attention on the meditation object, or on something else ("distraction"). But you can also have moments in which you aren't conscious at all. Each moment is extremely brief, but if you have a lot of moments of unconsciousness, this is "dullness." Dullness is just as much a problem as distraction, and there are practices specifically to combat it.

If you're just trying not to think, you might be dealing well with distraction, but you might also have a lot of dullness. It's easy to think you're very good at meditating, when actually you just have dullness.

If you can fix both distraction and dullness, you can attain a high level of awareness of what's going on in your mind. This leads to the sort of insights that for Buddhists are the main point. It also has a lot of side benefits, like just being more present and alive in your everyday life.

Learning React and the ecosystem at work and improving my CSS knowledge as I am mainly a backend guy.

On a more interesting note , learning Meditation via "The Mind Illuminated" book. Plus I plan to do a Goenka retreat later in the year (probably after reading a post on here "Vispasanna for Hackers" I think it was titled).

On a side note, I know we are encouraged to keep learning as developers, but being an old schooler (been writing software since 2000) I notice that people often keep learning new stuff instead of getting really good with the tools they already know. Usually the first attempt with a new framework / language isn't really the best code as it is a learning experience. As a result we have a lot of applications written in a less than perfect way. Curious what other peoples opinions are on this.

I suggest doing a search for 'The Mind Illuminated' and see if the book's description resonates with you. It contains meditation practices that aim to strengthen mindfulness. Unless you're amazingly unique you'll still have lapses in mindfulness but they can become shorter and less frequent over time depending on how diligently you practice during formal meditation and also in day-to-day life.

A lot of people here are offering up books with life advice (though I saw a recommendation for Sapiens which I can also highly recommend) which may or may not help depending on what your problem is. Why not just practice introspection daily through meditation instead? For some motivation and evidence on what it can do for you, I'd recommend "Why Buddhism is True". In spite of its title, the book aims to give some logic behind mindfulness meditation. If specifically you have been dealing with chronic low mood as a result of your life shattering crisis, I'd also recommend "The Mindful Way Through Depression". If that isn't an issue for you, I personally enjoy Jon Kabat Zinn's writing in general so I'd research and pick up one of his books. Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield are some others in this field who have a lot of experience teaching mindfulness meditation in a Western context and have a lot of very useful advice when it comes to practicing mindfulness meditation. There is another popular "how to meditate" book out there called The Mind Illuminated which I see recommended on HN every now and then, though I personally feel it is a bit overkill (it is more of a textbook). With regard to Alan Watts, I've only read "The Wisdom of Insecurity" and personally found it to be a waste of time and money, though I guess you can read it online for free so that saves you the money at least :).

> haven't read The Mind Illuminated, so I'm not sure if it's the same thing.

Basically it says at the end of the book telling us about: suffering, impeanence and no self. He tell us we should notice we become angry and enraged like a nihilist. (1)
The idea is that meditation and absorption is the only salvation to that , meaning without these skills you will be bound to suffer for real.

>Regardless, there is no such thing as "red pilled" when it comes to all of this, and nobody who engages in intense meditation is immune. I went through it once and that was quite enough.

Well I am sorry for the language, as a lay Buddhist myself keeping up with the discourses, middle length,combined of the Buddha and other sutras. They are nihilistic and don't talk about the meaning of life but just about salivation from suffering.

(1) Buddha was the first nihilist in the world. Source wikipedia.

Can you introspect on what was helpful about having a peer? Are there parts of that process you could replicate without needing a real coworker? You could talk to your engineering manager or team about how helpful it was to use pair programming.

If you've found that sporadically jumping into new work has a negative effect on your overall productivity, are there steps you can take to ignore distractions? Starting with 10 minute meditation sessions might help.[0] Be aware of when random thoughts are taking over and pulling you off task. If your higher-level goal is to focus better it will most likely require an internal change rather than an external force watching you. Although I guess software to block distracting content could help temporarily.

Building up focus and the ability to work in isolation probably takes time. It might help to write your frustrations down in a personal journal to try to identify issues and trends. Maybe the wikihow articles on how to focus would help for some focus strategies?[1]

Getting a friendly desk animal and doing some rubber ducking might help too. :D

Work shouldn't be so adversarial... The way you frame it makes your job sound like it's at odds with your personal development. Maybe your manager would have some ideas? Remote work is weird so lots of people are most likely running into things like this. Engineering people are probably the exception since having isolation for work is usually seen as a good thing.

[0] "The Mind Illuminated" is a good meditation book

[1] https://www.wikihow.com/Focus

You’re absolutely correct, the terms have been muddled and people, even ‘experts’ confuse the terms. The book: The Mind Illuminated is a great modern day guide on meditation and the different stages of progression one may hit along the way.

While meditating, one typically develops two skills:
1. Samadhi: stable attention, being able to focus on the meditation object without forgetting or getting distracted.
2. Sati: mindfulness. Best translated to something like peripheral awareness.

Samadhi is focus on the book you’re reading without losing your place because the dog is barking. Sati is being aware of the context of your environment (dog barks, birds chirping, the feeling of your butt against your chair) without losing sustained attention on the book.

One cannot really develop mindfulness without sustained awareness, as otherwise you context switch from the soup you’re eating to that thing Brett said at work, to back pain, back to the soup.

Training those two skills gives a person the ability to better focus their attention on things deliberately while keeping enough in your conscious periphery that you have enough context to switch attention to other things that matter.

I really liked the recent book The Mind Illuminated by John Yates as a basic meditation guide. Goes from the basics to advanced concentration, has detailed practice instructions for each stage, and is grounded in cognitive science with basically zero mysticism in the mix. An earlier short article http://dharmatreasure.org/wp-content/uploads/LightOnMeditati... describes the same 10-stage model the book is about.

My practice took off after reading Dr John Yates (Culadasa) "The Mind Illuminated". He is well versed in Pali texts and I believe he was a professor of neuroscience at Univ of Arizona.

I wish I could read the original Suttas in Pali but my language command is almost non-existent. So I have to rely on English translations by monks like Bhikku Bodhi and Bhikku Analayo.

For anyone on HN seriously interested in this topic, I would wholeheartedly recommend the recently published "The Mind Illuminated" book written by Culadasa, professor of neuroscience and a _very_ accomplished meditator. [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0990847705 ]

For all the other commenters asking why Mindfulness and Concentration are used as technical terms - that's because they correspond to Sati and Samadhi - terms in Pali used by the Buddha.

One of the takeaways of the book mentioned above is that concentration is NOT a state of being concentrated on a single object. It's a state of unification of the mind that persists regardless of its current object. The other important information (obvious for any serious meditator) is that, once reached, it DOESN'T require lot of force to sustain. On the contrary - it's a much more energy efficient mode of functioning. That's why in the 4th Jhana (one of the most advanced states of concentration) the breath completely subsides. It wouldn't be possible if it required so much force. BTW it doesn't mean that the oxygen intake stops completely as there's still some absorption caused by the air diffusion in the lungs and through the skin (cutaneous respiration).

Again, I really recommend the book by Culadasa for anyone even remotely interested. It's amazing from theoretical point of view and even more concerning meditation practice.

Meditation. Most days I meditate around the corner from work during lunch. It massively improves my mood, gives me new perspective, sometimes gives me a physical body high like a good edible, and helps me focus.

I usually meditate again before I leave work, which makes me less tired. I now have the energy to go out and socialise after work.

I initially dismissed meditation as stupid, but many of the smartest people I know and respect do it. Eventually I just said, "what if I'm wrong". Haven't looked back.

I can recommend starting with the Headspace app and The Mind Illuminated book.

My experience with lay practitioners (such as myself) is that you may have to try a few different things to find something that works while living a regular life. The Mind Illuminated, the Sedona Method, Louise Hay, the work of the stoics, yoga, qigong, therapy, all provide different approaches to developing emotional intelligence and managing difficult states of mind. I did zen meditation for a decade and while it provided many benefits I still struggled with anger in my day to day life. Two months of reading about and applying the stoic principles completely changed that.

I have seen other people who have this conception of meditation, but I am not sure it paints the whole picture. Among the different schools of meditation there are both those that tend to "suppress thoughts" and those that simply observe whatever arises.

In the first category I would put techniques which teach you to focus on a meditation object, most often the breath or a mantra. If someone says "mindfulness meditation" I generally think they are referring to this kind of meditation, and examplars can be found in books like Mindfulness in Plain English or The Mind Illuminated (even though there are also both quite different approaches to meditation, one being focused on "insight" first and the other based on "concentration" first). They don't teach you to suppress thoughts, but they teach you to focus on a particular thing and IGNORE thought, which has the effect, long term, of causing those thoughts not to arise.

But there are also schools that focus on "open awareness" or "just sitting" styles of meditation. This is very common teaching in Zen Buddhism but is also practiced in some schools Tibetan Buddhism, at least in Dzogchen. This, I think, is what you are referring to; where you sit and observe at a mental distance whatever thoughts arise. Eventually, this also causes thoughts to arrive much less frequently.

If you are referring to the research literature, however, I think mindfulness generally refers to the first kind. As with everything, the borders blur together.

I can recommend "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa. It presents a path for meditation in ten stages, describing in simple and clear language goals and techniques for each. There are both directly actionable advice for many different circumstances, challenges, etc., and more theoretical / philosophical discussions for context and understanding.

I have followed the system described in the book for about 15 months, and think it had a positive impact on my life and my well-being in general.

Same. But despite years of practice, it took reading The Mind Illuminated and sitting 45-60min every single day for 4-6 months before some walls started really breaking down. I lost my social anxiety and a lot of fear in general. But just a word of a caution: serious meditation practice is NOT all sunshine and rainbows. Most people eventually encounter a "washing of sins" or "dark night of the soul" phase that can be pretty gnarly if you're not expecting it. I didn't think to would happen to me but it really knocked me on my ass when it happened.

Cannot strongly recommend enough "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates.

https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Illuminated-Meditation-Integrati...

It's been discussed on HN before (it's how I found it a few years ago) and breaks down meditation in a systematic way while relating the phenomena described in Buddhist texts to current psychological principles. This "moments of consciousness model" of the mind is discussed at length and a short answer to you question is yes, different sensory moments are integrated in "binding moments".

Seconding the recommendation for The Mind Illuminated. It's the distillation an enormous amount of Buddhist meditation knowledge from several lineages into a modernized, relatively scientific format.

Yates also makes the admirable choice of retaining traditional terminology and outlook in cases where modern science wouldn't have anything useful to add (he resists scientizing, in other words.)

Other than Culadasa's 'The Mind Illuminated' which others have recommended here, I can recommend Michael Taft's 'The Mindful Geek'. There's also Chade-Meng Tan's 'Joy on Demand'.

If you don't actually meditate regularly, much of what even the best meditation books talk about can sound faffy and repetitive. So please, give the actual practice at least a month or two before deciding to drop it.

Even 10 minutes a day is OK if you don't skip more than a day or two over several weeks. Practicing everyday builds aptitude and sensitivity during concentration meditation a lot better than longer sessions with gaps of a few days.

Not the OP, but I also got into meditation a while ago, and it helped a lot with my seasonal depression. I followed the instructions from John Yates' "The Mind Illuminated" book, which I actually found from someone on Hacker News raving about it. It's really straightforward with describing the goals and techniques for each stage.

Yes, I'm a software engineer, predominantly C++, research, backend stuff, operational transform and multi-master replication (http://cedanet.com.au/ceda/). I've been doing Vipassana in the tradition of SN Goenka for 23 years, and having done quite a few 10-day silent retreats, I can say that they have been extremely beneficial to many aspects of my life, including technical stuff. I have also recently been quite interested in Culadasa's "The Mind Illuminated" book. I've recently connected with some other technical people around Culadasa's book.