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Risto_Saarelma comments on February 2016 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: ArisKatsaris 02 February 2016 12:20AM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 02 February 2016 04:59:27AM 3 points [-]

The Mind Illuminated by John Yates is my new favorite meditation instruction book. Has lots of modern neuroscience grounding, completely secular, and presents a very detailed step-by-step instruction on going from not having a daily meditation habit going to attaining very deep concentration states.

Comment author: CurtisSerVaas 04 February 2016 01:43:07AM 4 points [-]

I also think John Yates's Progressive Stages of Mindfulness in Plain English is orders of magnitude better than all the other meditation books I've read.

From what I could tell from looking at the table of contents (and page lengths) for both, the book/pdfs I linked covers the same content, but is free! Though, I might consider buying his newest book, just because I liked the other one so much.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 04 February 2016 06:10:52PM 2 points [-]

Yes, The Mind Illuminated is basically the same ten-step model as the one in that article, but expanded to book length and with lots of extra practice advice and theory of mental models.

Comment author: Hohn 02 February 2016 02:45:46PM 2 points [-]

I recently got hold of From Under the Rubble, a collection of essays by Solzhenitsyn and other Russian thinkers written in the 1970s and circulated surreptitiously among themselves.

It occurred to me that I'm not the first person to ask: "where do we go from here? How do we go there?" and these essays are thought-provoking responses.

They are decidedly not very rational-- I'm not sure there is a rational basis for optimism in 1970s Soviet Russia.