epigeios
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People's inner simulator is almost always more accurate than their explicit models. It's just less precise. The thing about your statement of [if it were more accurate, people would be using it more, and be successful at more things] requires a few initial assumptions to be true. The first is that people are able to use their inner simulator on purpose, which is usually not the case from my observation. The second is that people are able and willing to take the path indicated by their inner simulator when it contrasts with their explicit models, which is also usually not the case. Then there is an additional... (read more)
RE: your frazzled after-busy state. Yeah, breathing meditation at that time is not only hard, it's kinda pointless. Well, until you get to the point where you can either enter a state of right-brain flow on purpose, or enter a REM-like state on purpose. When you can do those, breath control is a natural part of it.
A trick is to control your breath while you are busy. Every chance you get, especially when heavily focused on something, take a single slow breath, preferably into either your gut or your whole body (but just a slow breath with no direction is better than not doing it at all). If you can't do that while you are focused on something, practice. This is one of the most important things people learn by practicing QiGung or internal martial arts.
In my experience, controlling my breath while I am busy allows for a faster recovery, and lessens the need for sleep after recovery.
The science of breath control is unexplored. From my own meditation practices, it works like this:
The entirety of the body cavity is lined with a fibrous tissue capable of contracting and expanding; or rather, tightening and loosening. Movement of the diaphragm and the resulting expansion of the lungs causes a pumping motion of the whole inside of the body cavity, which in turn causes a pumping motion of all of the interstitial fluid in the entire body. Loosening and tightening areas of the body cavity allows the pumping motion to be controlled, applying a greater portion of the force to a specific area of the body. Likewise, loosening... (read more)
You said "... not life changing ...". I think you're underestimating how much your life is going to be different now that you have the ability to be aware of your body. Certainly it won't change the direction of your life, but it definitely changes what you are capable of accomplishing within your lifetime. It expands your potential skill-set by a relatively wide margin.
Just think, there are 7 other things (roughly) you can become mindful of which will equally expand your potential skill-set.
Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.
The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That's stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.
Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the... (read more)
I just realized that this is precisely why I think LessWrong will fail in the end. And why I have been unable to help.
From what I have seen, beyond all of the awesome information on how to use one's thoughts appropriately, LessWrong suggests that people attempt to interpret things correctly. I strongly disagree with that ideal. Interpreting something correctly is, in the end, just as bad as interpreting something wrongly; because both are equally different from perceiving something.
This is why people call science and reductionism a religion. Interpreting something and assigning it a truth value is trying to assign a truth value to an interpretation. Yeah, that's... (read more)
Well, I hate to say something against your post here, because I quite agree with it all. Except there is one Mind Projection Fallacy of which I question whether it was done on purpose. The fallacy where you are reducing the poem to it's parts.
The majority of poetry is metaphor. All of the specific examples in that poem are metaphors for the feeling of majesty. So to the poet, those three examples are quite the same. The poet's distaste for scientific reduction isn't that everything is explained away, it's that explaining something reduces it's perceived majesty.
Now, to us reductionists, it is the opposite. Explaining something increases it's perceived majesty.... (read more)
Crap! I'm sorry I didn't see this. I've had a love/hate relationship with LessWrong while I've been getting as far as I can with meditation. a year late, hopefully you get this response so that it may have some use.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/blr/attention_control_is_critical_for/6frz. In this post I describe the steps for learning the prerequisite to Taoist meditation. At the time, I was not able to properly describe Taoist meditation, despite being very familiar with it. I can at least try now.
The prerequisite to Taoist meditation is about practicing being aware, and practicing controlling awareness. Controlling awareness requires being aware of what one is aware of, and so is also a practice of... (read 865 more words →)
An example of imagining that something is true is having the idea that things ought to be a certain way, such as thinking that people ought to be not racist. Observe that people are racist. Continue to think that people ought to be not racist. Hear someone be racist.
The difference between taking offense and being angry is that taking offense is when anger is directed at a concept. It's okay to be angry at a racist for doing racist things, but it's a bad idea to be angry at the concept of racism.
Soft skills are hard. I'm extremely good at learning soft skills. I try as hard as I can to teach one whenever someone desires one, but they're damn near impossible to teach. I've thus far only been successful at teaching someone how to do something related, in a way that their mind can grasp and run with, so that a few years later they will have developed the soft skill "on their own" (At which point, they will be doing exactly as I said exactly how I told them to, and they will tell me about this cool new thing they figured out how to do, and question why... (read 497 more words →)