Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.
This is fascinating and I wish more people would describe experiences like this in terms of familiar metaphors like key-framing instead of metaphors which only make sense to other accomplished meditators.
Maybe it's just the writer in me, but I feel that any subjective experience can be communicated.
What is the difference between knowing consciously that identity is an illusion and intuitively feeling that identity is an illusion? I became a good reductionist long ago, but I still feel my own identity. I'm not sure if I would want to lose it.
I'm glad you liked the key-frame metaphor. I'm planning on writing a proper article about these experiences and developing a coherent language that makes sense to other physical algorithms trying to experience themselves as such. However I feel that I need to meditate a little longer to make sure I'm not making up too much nonsense.
The main difference between knowing that the self is an illusion and feeling it as such is control of the self-alief. Even without getting into a meditative state I can steer my experience from the habitual one that I use to soc... (read more)