Time magazine said it could not discern whether his political views were left- or right-wing. The Spectator wrote that his worldview "wasn't pinned to a standard left-right axis". Jacobin stated he held "a hodgepodge of views and political beliefs that don't neatly map onto any one category on the political spectrum."

Kirk's assassin, Tyler Robinson, did not vote in the last two elections, and only recently became obsessed with anti-fascism. My point is, the left-right spectrum is not adequate to understand what's happening to America. Actions can be tagged as right or left depending on which tribe gets mad about them, but the source of the most spectacular actions, the energy that motivates them, is deeper than politics.

I find it really difficult to believe someone was able to attain cessation in 20 hours of practice and very little meditation experience. That's like saying you one-shotted Dark Souls without ever playing a video game before..... Getting cessation in 1-3 years meditating an hour or so a day, with a good guide book, maybe with a couple retreats and a bit of advice from a teacher, is perfectly doable. Except the weird thing is, it's far more likely on accident or blind luck. That's because when you don't know what to expect you're just exploring for fun.

There must be a wide range of talents at getting to "wow" mental states, in the same way that there's a wide range in other mental skills. So the people who get their minds blown after 20 hours are going to write about it and get readers, not so much the people who get subtle benefits after hundreds of hours. Maybe I'm not resistant to jhanas, just average, and Asparouhova is super talented and assumes that everyone else is too. This happens with a lot of things, especially in the shallow age of social media: The public discourse is dominated by the lucky and talented (or by liars) and everyone else thinks there's something wrong with them.


Second tangent. I keep thinking about Asparouhova's metaphor that the jhanas are like a video game:

I might play through the game again if I'm feeling nostalgic, or to uncover new ways of "beating" it, or find any hidden quests or parts of the map I might've missed along the way. But that would just be for fun. I know that all those paths will lead to the same ending, and I already know what the ending is. My intrinsic desire to finish the game has been satisfied.

This oddly reminds me of the "rat utopia" experiment, in which rats were given a basic living space of fixed size, and unlimited food. The population swelled, they developed very strange behaviors, and in the end they died out in an unbelievable way: Every last rat lost interest in procreating. This is hard to explain without the concept of a collective consciousness, or a superorganism. And once you open that door, you have to wonder about humans.

Not that we're going to die out, but that the flashiest accomplishments of modernity are not the platforms for our transcendent destiny, but just crazy stuff we wanted to try one time, and now we're like, "Computers, been there, done that." I expect the next age to be slower paced and more grounded, but we'll also be doing cool stuff we haven't done yet.

If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack.

He links to this detailed page by Nadia Asparouhova, How to do the jhanas, and there's good stuff in the Hacker News thread, including a sub-thread about attention in different languages, and a fascinating summary of the book The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han: "I think it's about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects."

Karlsson tells the story of going to the symphony with his eyes closed, and in thirty minutes, his imagination popped out "what felt like two or three feature films." Yeah, that's what they call hyperphantasia. I'm not aphantasic, but my imagination rarely volunteers anything. It usually only contains what I do the work of putting there, and I'm wondering how common that is.

I also wonder if I'm "ajhanic", because supposedly the real point of the jhanas is not the bliss, but that that in going through the process, you learn to better manage your moment-to-moment mental health, and I've done that. I can pull out of bad thought loops, absorb boredom like a sponge, and I'm making progress on clumsiness. In many hours of practice and lots of experimentation, I've already done most of the exercises on those two pages, and I have not yet had a "wow" mental state without drugs.

On that subject, from a thread on the Stoner Thoughts subreddit:

We too once swore as kids we'd make it through the madness sober, but the truth is this modern age feels like it was designed to break that vow. The pressure, the noise, the endless scroll of insanity -- no wonder so many of us need a buffer just to breathe. But I've also learned: even when you lean on smoke or drink, you're not failing -- you're surviving. You're carrying the flame through an impossible age.

In 2000 the Oxford Junior Dictionary, aimed at seven-year-olds, dropped 'almonds', 'blackberry' and 'crocus' in favour of 'analogue', 'block graph' and 'celebrity'. The 2012 edition continued writing nature out of young minds, replacing 'acorn', 'buttercup' and 'conker' with 'attachment', 'blog' and 'chat room'. Instead of 'catkin', 'cauliflower', 'chestnut' and 'clover' they now have 'cut and paste', 'broadband' and 'analogue'. Heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster and panther have all been deleted.

This is a Tower of Babel moment. We are losing the ability to understand the real world, and each other, as our attention is consumed by kaleidoscopic navel-staring. I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I'm confident that the two most common predictions of the future are wrong: There will be no space colonies, and there will be no human extinction. We're going to keep muddling around on the earth for a very long time, and at some point, they'll think the internet was a myth, and they'll look at our remaining ruins and wonder about the mysterious people who made them.