Notes

The following Reddit question landed in my inbox, and I couldn’t resist writing a long answer. I thought I’d paste it here, in case it’s of general interest.

The question

If I spend entire meditation sessions only aware of the fact that I can’t focus, would that be enough?

I get incredibly restless and frustrated that I can’t enter a deep focus, even when I sit for a long time I often fail. The deepest insight I can attain is merely the fact that I can’t focus. Is this progress? It doesn’t feel like it…

My response

It’s not failure, it’s great! You’re directly coming into contact with the truth of Anatta (non-self, no absolute control, etc.) and the suffering that comes from clinging on to the idea that you should have a kind of control over your mind that you don’t!

Most suffering in life comes from indignantly grasping for a kind of control that we don’t actually have. Or otherwise insisting the world be different from how it is. You’re in contact with the core of what the Buddha taught on the cause of suffering & its solution! Naturally seeing how this grasping leads to suffering will incline the mind to relinquish it. Just as if we noticed our hand was on a stove and that that’s what was causing the burning pain! The whole of the spiritual path is this as far as I can tell. As we see and become aware of more, we hit ourselves less.

All that said, some practical advice: The quality and consistency of your focus matters far more than the quantity. Being with the breath completely for 10 breaths will genuinely do you more good than being with it haphazardly for an hour. This is counterintuitive, but the mechanism is the same as with habit streaks. When you break a streak on a habit, it’s like the habit shatters. But when the streak is active, the habit is fairly solid, automatic, etc. It’s the same with the breath. You’re building a habit of paying attention to the breath exclusively. If this is genuinely all you’re doing, the brain will learn the “habit” extremely quickly!

I cannot stress enough, quality matters more than quantity. Forget how long you’re meditating. Measure progress by how deeply you can be with the breath! Tune into anything smooth, flowy, nice, continuous, and measure progress by the depth and continuity of that. You can see how you’re doing live, while you’re meditating, every few seconds! It can be the same as a videogame practiced like this, with the right attitude of course :) (our attitude also being something we can’t always control. anatta!)

Now, the restlessness and frustration you feel, this is too much trying. There’s a teaching (AN 6.55) where the Buddha makes this exact point. You need to tune the amount of effort like you’d tune an instrument.

An important kind of this tuning is becoming better at discerning the different kinds of desire/trying. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of desire. tanha-desire (unwholesome desire, grasping desire, thirsty desire, push desire) and chanda-desire (wholesome desire, interest, you’re “pulled to it”, you “want to do it”). Better understanding what causes chanda-desire, and what causes tanha-desire, and how you can tell them apart, is a huge part of practice. In some ways, all of practice. If we could see, with total clarity, the effects our wholesome vs. unwholesome desires had, we would naturally reject the unwholesome for the wholesome, just as you’d take your hand off a hot stove after seeing how it’s burning you (see MN 19 for more.)

Back to my meditation retreat now. It’s wrapping up, so I checked my email and got sniped by this question. Oops! I hope it’s helpful though ❤️

Best of luck, may we both become evermore happy & free!

PS: Highly recommend “A path with heart” for a book on meditation & the whole spiritual path! It’s incredibly wholesome and healing even just to read. And extremely deep! Far deeper than I currently know haha :D

Very draft-y/note-y. Hopefully others benefit.

I finished my second Jhourney retreat recently. I wanted to talk about what I spent most of it dealing with, what I’d call my “EA demon”.

For the first few days I couldn’t really meditate. I kept trying things, carefully forming theories and experimenting. But I kept feeling worse and worse. Depression and self-hate edging into suicidality. An extremely malicious voice was telling me to kill myself on repeat.

In a shower, while investigating this, I came into full contact with the malice for the first time. It was striking! I’ve never felt that much malice before. It was the mental equivalent of “die n-word die”, all directed at me!

After two days of failing to solve this on my own, I asked for my laptop back to call people. I was really spiraling. The Jhourney team scheduled me with their on-site coach, Mark Estefanos.

The following day I worked out and managed to summon unwavering resolve and temporarily defeated the demon in my head. Felt good even! But after I stopped meditating it came back. Then came my talk with Mark.

We did some IFS, I can transcribe the session from memory:

Me: “I have this mental demon, I’m not sure if it’s a part of myself or an actual demon. Just pure malice directed at me.”

Mark: “Well, either way we can work with it. We’ll see.”

Me: feeling relieved mark is implying he can help work with it no matter what

Mark: “So, start off by finding the part in your body”

Me: (After maybe 30 seconds) in my head

Mark: Where in your head?

Me: (After maybe 1 minute) in the top front

Mark: Great. Now ask it what it wants?

Me: It’s just telling me to die.

Mark: Chase it around and poke it with a stick till it answers. You’re not exactly on good terms.

Me: laughs Okay, (minute later), it says I should die because I’m evil/bad. And what does evil mean? Hmm… (minute later) oh, it thinks I’m a mass murderer from not working on AI safety enough. It’s my EA trauma!

Mark: Great, so it is a part of your mind! This’ll make things easier.

…(will transcribe the rest later. it’s late. roughly: Mark asked me what made it that I should die and not other people. I got back “I should be different/better than this”, this led me to the responsibility/ev thing, then mark asked me what wholesome orientation i’d have now. I said some stuff. he added on “humility: not knowing what I can do”, I included that, radiated the wholesome replacement orientation I wish my 16-year old self could have, then everything got crazy.)…

After radiating the wholesome wish to save all sentient beings, including myself, with no contradiction or hate involved, with wisdom, with humility, all included, to the EA demon part. I started violently shaking. Trauma release shaking. I got on the bed and shook violently for ~40 minutes. None of it conscious. I would just radiate the wholesome version of EA that I know now and ask, “What do you think of this as a way to meet your goals?” and then I would start shaking. My muscles hurt a little afterward. It was that intense.

And I felt much better! It didn’t fully resolve, there’s soo much there it seems. But progress!

I continued the unfolding on my own, asking mark pointed questions over lunch every day. I still haven’t integrated it all. This is a huge piece of trauma. The result of fully taking responsibility for the suffering of the world, for years, and telling myself that, if I failed to act, I would effectively be a mass murderer. A year+ of burnout and suicidal depression founded on this. So much pain.

I find it plausible that often when I feel depressed, apathetic, low energy, it’s actually something like this being repressed. Better to feel numb than self-hate you can’t deal with!

Very likely the reason this came up on retreat was because I had the space & safety for it to stop being repressed. I hope I keep being able to work with it as I return to regular life tomorrow. There’s definitely more to do.

It was awesome to meet Mark, he really is a mind wizard! I’m excited to keep learning how to work with my interiority. There are a lot of bugs I want to resolve! I hope I’ll post an “EA demon 2” in a few months that says I’ve resolved it!

This’ll probably be my main focus until it’s resolved. Mark said if I bring up the part/issue and measure how “big/weighty/dark/etc” it feels I can roughly estimate “how much left” there is. I’m still learning to do this, but when I can attempt to bring up the part and basically can’t (short of re-creating it) I’ll know I’m ~done. Then, on to the many other ways I abuse myself!

Oh, one more thought relating to this: Very plausibly there’s a lot of repressed grief involved that I need to feel. I almost cried while shaking but couldn’t. I’ve been a bit blocked on crying recently.

Really, the critical thing here is to learn to measure progress while I’m working. That seems to require two things:

1. Being able to vibe-estimate “how much of the thing I’ve worked through” in a way that’s relatively stable/real. Not just a measure of “how active is this issue right now”.
2. Being able to tell when I’ve resolved something vs. just temporarily placated a part. Mark said there’s a difference between a relaxation/release when something resolves, and a “going dark” / “losing awareness” feeling. I’ll start to get a feel for this with experience. Exciting!

I’ll note: Mark did mention that often we’re “Part factories”. I asked him how he thinks about if there’s “Just one part” or “Many” and he said something like “Oh yeah, there could be 50, we often make ‘part factories’ so you could have this guy, his brother, etc. etc.”

This reminds me of another Mark, the author of meditationbook.page, who said the mind can be very discrete. It’s possible the way this stuff works is like, discretely integrating parts, but there’s just 50 copies of the same part. Or other possible models. Stuff is weird. The important thing is the ability to:

1. Know I’m making progress
2. Know how much more there is to go (roughly)

I expect that with more work I’ll get faster and faster at integrating the various copies of the EA demon, and then eventually I’ll be done. Or at least, done enough that I move on to other abusive voices (such as my internalized-dad voice, yelling at me for not being perfect!)

There are things like programming that I’m naturally interested in, and get very good at without much effort. Then, there are things like meditation that, at least historically, I have not been similarly good at, at all, when compared to myself with programming.

A friend of mine is an exceptional technical meditator. And for him, the mindset he approached meditation with seems very similar to the mindset I originally approached programming with. A playful, serious exploration and pushing of capabilities and following of his interests. Random projects like “Can I make my tactile field into a ball?”, “Can I split my consciousness into independently running threads?” feel very analogous to me learning programming and thinking, “Can I write a virus that changes people’s desktop to random gopher pictures and persists?”, “Can I write a compiler for rust to Lua?” etc.

(Note that I’m using “mindset” here to refer to their entire mental state in relation to the goal, with all the subtle nonverbal feelings and unconscious bits! I don’t mean something as shallow as “growth mindset v.s. not”. There’s so much more going on than what we’re aware of, or can even describe once we introspect and try to. When I say “my mindset was” I’m casting a partial understanding I have into lossy words. There’s a ton of loss between this and the true objects of interest. Keep that in mind! I’m tempted to use a new term like “motivational architecture” to avoid the shallow thinking associations that the term mindset has, even if it is close.)

Similarly, my same friend has had trouble writing for a blog, despite knowing the long-term benefits. After a lot of back and forth interviewing, we realized that, when I’m writing a blog post, a large part of my motivation comes from sharing what I’ve written with specific people I know and being able to talk about it! I’m by no means a prolific writer, in fact, my blog has been relatively stagnant for the last few years, even if historically I wrote a lot (and derived many benefits from it! Fellowships, people reaching out, etc.)

His motivational architecture, in contrast, was similar to mine with meditation! His mindset, if rendered into words, I think was something like: “I should write more” (ugh) “for the long-term benefits” (long delay) “writing is less interesting than other stuff, needs force” (ugh). Contrast this with mine, which roughly rendered into words would be “Oooh this is such a cool idea! I want to share it with my friends and see their reactions and lower the activation energy to share this in the future!”

The failure we were both making was not realizing other people were running around with drastically different mindsets and relations to the same goals! There can be so much hidden variation, generally that people aren’t even conscious of! Without realizing all the subtle differences in mindset that can be going on, it’s easy to exclude the solution from your search space, prematurely thinking that other, successful people just have “more discipline” or otherwise are magically different from you.

As for shifting your mindset once you realize there’s a better one. I’m still figuring this out, but my main takeaway so far is to pay a lot of attention to your mindset and, whenever you notice you’re doing the bad thing, STOP. Better to do nothing than to entrench bad conditioning. So, rule #1 is DON’T DO THE BAD THING. This is, as far as I can tell, really important when your past behavior looks like “I keep trying to do this, I do it for a bit and then burn out, then try again much later”. If doing more of it anti-motivates you (on average), something is horribly wrong, stop immediately!

Beyond stopping the bad thing, you can try vividly imagining doing the thing with the wholesome mindset you want to adopt. You might need to change exactly “what” you’re doing a little, but that’s fine, often good in fact. I’ve noticed my motivation is generally trying to track how valuable things are, and if my motivation drops this is usually a sign I’m working on the wrong thing (or the right thing in the wrong way). Very important though; if vividly imagining doesn’t arouse that kind of inductive, “pull” motivation, and you’re still doing it out of a more “push”-y, “should”-y place, then stop! Do something else. You can’t force yourself to stop forcing yourself. Don’t stress it, over the long run becoming genuinely obsessed will be far more valuable than trying yet again the thing that hasn’t been working! Insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results (assuming that this is a domain you’ve been stuck. If not, all good.)

A lot of what I’m talking about is well-described by Joe Hudson’s want over should and other content on goals. But I haven’t heard the rendition of this idea that’s like, “hey, you idiot, the reason some people have an easy time doing the same thing you have a hard time is because their mindset is different. Consider investigating the differences between your mindset and theirs, and figuring out how you can shift yours”. I also expect eventual gains from the more detailed first-principles thinking I’m doing here, even if entirely adopting an ontology like Joe’s could result in some immediate gains, the lock-in is scary. There’s so much more we don’t understand!

I’ll share more notes here as I understand more. My study of myself continues!