I’ve been meditating again this year.
A third of the time with Sam Harris’s new app.
I got it for free since I got in early. Ages ago and regularly I’ve donated to his podcast. You should feed the media you love.
It seems way more expensive than warranted otherwise to me otherwise. A tenner would make sense, a tenner a month is crazy.
But people value things differently.
He seems to be telling me often to look for the one who hears, the one who sees, the sensor who senses and implying that such a thing is not there.
But I don’t grok it. Obviously there is in fact a thing which hears. There can be no hearing without a hearer, and I am, in this case, that hearer.
What has two thumbs and is the person thinking my thoughts and seeing my visual field and hearing the sound I hear?
This nervous-system and it’s flesh casing!
He keeps going on about how everything in consciousness appears in “the same space”, which is also bollocks.
I understand there are people who smell colours and hear sounds and see auras but in my actually physically experienced world, I rarely see a sound. I don’t know what that even means. My consciousness isn’t all “the same space”, it’s very divided.
If he just means “everything you experience is a member of the set of things you might experience” then, well, duh.
Still.
That’s just the lunchtime mediation. The evening mediation is twice as long and as no distracting voice to argue with. Just staring at my nose with my eyes closed concentrating on my breath.
In many ways a “guided mediation” makes no sense. If you are listening to the guide, then you are not concentrating on the breath! Stop listening to the guide and concentrate on the breath!
And that stuff I’m getting more out of. It’s disconcerting and exciting to fall slowly into lucid dreams some times and also to feel like I’m training and focusing attention on other times. Not sure which I prefer.
The one third of the time Sam is talking, I’m mostly just throwing up my arms in confusion and saying things like “well, duh, I’m right here, on top of this pillow, and I am completely self aware, why are you implying that I might think myself anything other than a nervous system computing?”
Which I don’t think is good meditation.
But as I say, I’m liking the half-lucid-dreaming thing, and it’s early days.