Awesome. This is exactly what I was expecting from meditation and to hear it confirmed really psyches me up for working hard on it. Thank you for sharing.

A few days into my first vipassana course I started to become more aware of my thoughts, and was unpleasantly surprised to find that a large majority of them were ridiculously self-indulgent. I was running simulations of altered past events and possible future events where everything just happened to fall amazingly in my favor. I got the girl, pummeled the bad guy, etc. I would now call these wireheading patterns, but I didn't think of them that way at the time.

I've become a lot better at this in the last few months, but this used to be my normal mode of thinking. It led me to believe I was incredibly narcissistic, which further led to me developing lots of safety mechanisms to keep that part of me from poisoning my thinking; in some cases, the safety mechanisms are I think too harsh and too self-critical, because there is too much affective negative self-judgment. The big thing I've realized from meditation thus far is that the affective judgments aren't necessary; mindfulness without judgment is enough to avoid harmful attractors.

But I got sidetracked; really, I'm curious, is this a common disposition among Less Wrong rationalists? I didn't think so as I'd heard of the typical mind fallacy and most people don't tend to talk about this facet of their thinking very much (maybe because it's embarrassing). But if it's more common than I thought, then maybe I wasn't as incredibly narcissistic as I thought, and maybe this type of wireheading pattern is a typical attractor in mindspace.

I'd also be in for the Mountain View/Sunnyvale thing.

Post in this thread if you live in the Bay Area.

This is one of the only feeds in my RSS reader where I'm compelled to click through and read the comments. Thanks.