All of robm_73@hotmail.com's Comments + Replies

Strong upvoted this one.

A prominent Buddhist monk in the Thai Forest Tradition (Ajahn Jayasaro) said the following, which I feel is highly relevant here:

Someone had asked (llama) Kohima, "What do you think of expanding minds through chemical means?" He said, if you have an ignorant mind then you just get expanded ignorance. I thought he was just on the spot. It is all within the sphere of darkness, isn’t it? You are still playing around with different modes of ignorance. You are not actually going beyond. You are not transcending. You are transc... (read more)

Hi Julia, thanks for your comment!

I hadn't thought so much about the time saving aspects of having fewer clothes and would also be interested in seeing the effects minimalism can have on this.

Definitely understand your point about smaller living spaces and sleep quality. There are people who can take minimalism too far in a well meaning way and end up ultimately reducing their well-being and having the many negative spill-over effects of this. So I feel the minimalist actions someone takes on should net them an improvement to their well-being in some ... (read more)

Hi Siebe!

Love these ideas. I think I saw a mediation session in an EA Global Event schedule once but can't remember which one, I'm afraid. Leading a session like that would be a dream come true.

I'd also be interested in getting funding to test out the effects more fully for the good of all EAs. :)

Hi Ben, sorry for the double-reply.

It just occurred to me that I could make a survey in something like SurveyMonkey and link to it in the post, then periodically update the rankings in here if a decent number of people have voted.

Any thoughts?

Hi Ben, thanks for your comment.

I love your idea of aggregate recommendations and would be very interested in doing a version where that kind of functionality is possible. Off the top of my head, I can only think of posting each item in the list as an individual comment in here so people can upvote their favourites. I'm sure there must be a less clunky way to do this, though. Can I check if you have any ideas, please?

2
Aaron Gertler
5y
Creating a spreadsheet? You can have two columns (media title and a number) and ask people to increment the number by one if they found something helpful. This could be better than a survey -- it's faster to go through and easier to update.

Hi Siebe,

Hopefully the former, haha! I really like this idea, as metta meditation is something I often neglect in favour of "concentration meditation" on the breath. I really like something Matthieu Ricard suggested, which is just a few times a day for a few moments wishing all beings well with the effects of this well-wishing staying with you throughout your day.

1
SiebeRozendal
5y
That is nice! Here are some other ideas for guided meditation: * For during EA events: they can be very exciting and very taxing, and the meditation could help to calm people down, refresh, process what's going on, etc. * For demotivated moments: sometimes EA feels like running against a wall - the effort just seems a complete waste, and it'd be nice to have some meditation to turn to. It could help people deal healthily with setbacks by trying to learn from them, and then accepting whatever is. * There's a bunch of other types that might be interesting to explore via meditation, such as obsession, suffering (of others and oneself), egoism, (dis)connection to EA's and non-EA's, value drift, multiple things from the replacing guilt series and other EA self-care stuff, etc. In general, I think meditation is a very interesting medium for learning that we aren't using much yet. I would be very interested in seeing someone do a few of these to test the idea, and I'd be interested in getting someone funding to increase the volume if the pilots are successful.

Hi Milan, thanks for the comment. Yeah, I guess this is similar to the idea of the second arrow https://www.wildmind.org/texts/the-arrow. So often the lion's share of our discomfort in doing something can come from the thoughts we have about it.

Hi Moses, thanks for the comment. Totally agree with you here. There's a certain amount of thinking that is useful to consider things and make good decisions but the mind has a tendency to carry on thinking for a long time after that threshold of usefulness has been reached. After that, it can easily turn into over-analysing, doubt, worry and all sorts of other productivity-sapping stuff.

4
Moses
5y
I think it's more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there's a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is "I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X", or whether it's "X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it's either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass."