I am really inspired. This has happened before.

This is part of a work in progress; I have a lot of ideas floating around and I'd like to track their progression over time.

Tourism is boring me. You can read more about that on my travel blog if you like. The thing is, I'm just not inclined to go see more buildings or natural sites or, hell, wonders of the world. Nor even to find the best coffee or beer.

I feel like I've just been consuming. Consuming food and drinks, consuming experiences. Traveling around the world to find the best experiences to consume.

Now, let me be clear that I don't see any moral wrong in this; I just see it as unfulfilling. I don't think that being The Best at consuming (either as a gourmet or as No Impact Man) will lead me to a life that I am satisfied with. Consuming seems to be just one part of life.

I've felt like this before at least once: after coming back from Maastricht. My five months there were some of the most carefree and debaucherous (though, really, still not very debaucherous) of my life. I got so fed up with consuming and excited about coming back and getting things done. What happened? I immediately made a few really productive changes to my life. Before I left, in December 2006, I was living in a basement, grumbling about academic and extracurricular commitments, bored with work and eating too much GoLean Crunch and soy milk. After I returned and made these changes, in August 2007, I was enjoying classes, drawing cartoons, living in an awesome orange room in a house owned by one of my best friends, beginning a great new relationship, researching fervently in a new lab, committing myself selectively to extracurriculars, and listening to The Knife. It was one of the best half-years of my life.

Let's (royal we) do this again. Let's begin a new career in a new town. But let's do it even better this time. Now that I know a bit more about how life works, perhaps I can recreate my life with a bit more wisdom. What are the parts to a fulfilling life, and how can I make those easy to achieve? I'll start with a "wish list" of floaty ideas, and see if I can then boil them down into concrete things to do.

- career, sure. Think I've spent enough time on this one. Grad school will be a challenge, and hopefully also a joy, but either way it'll be unpredictable enough that I don't know how to optimize it yet.
- eating right: some ideas include only buying food that cannot be immediately eaten, committing to three square meals and no snacks, or cultivating the joy of hunger that I've been working on. A less likely but still neat idea is refined-sugar teetotaling.
- exercising right: first, I will ride bikes everywhere, as usual. Second, though, I think just biking is not enough. I think I would like to do something else, something to work on all the parts of the body besides cardiovascular health and leg strength. I would like to fight people, like wrestling, because fighting requires strength and balance, and is fun. Perhaps the closest real-world analogue to this is a martial art? If so, which one? Finally, some yoga might help too.
- mental and spiritual health. Keep on meditating. Go on retreat sometimes. Do not lose the urge to get enlightened, and mindfully monitor the rest of my life, changing stuff if necessary.
- healthy social group. I've always been working on this. One thing that will help is the new less-judgmental attitude I'm developing. Maybe I should entertain more? I like throwing parties and hosting small gatherings; maybe I should invite more people more often with a cause. Some ideas include an album listening deal (like a film club but you listen to an album instead) and this creative circle thing I've tossed about but never done.
- dating. I should dedicate some energy to this.
- creating. As posted a couple posts ago, I think this is healthy, and I don't do it much. Also this. My current whim is that I want to start making some designs. Probably digital. Maybe try something like a Wacom tablet to do some drawing? Also, code more. This is very floaty, but I do want to find some time for, y'know, "hey, what if I could write a script to run my refrigerator for me?"
- serendipity. Make 20% of my life surprises that I don't like, so I keep growing. This feels like a cross-cutting concern, a way to do things instead of something else to do, and I don't know how to do it.
- listening to new music. I still like doing this, and it doesn't seem to fit anywhere else.

Why do the best things remind me of video games?

I'll be going through Angkor Wat or Hampi or something, and I'll think "this is like a scene from Myst or Riven." My standard of excellence for instrumental music is the soundtrack from Final Fantasy games. Even a really good story is like one from a video game plot.

Why is this? It's like I've imprinted on old RPG's and puzzle games (FFVI, FFVII, FFX, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Baldur's Gate I/II, Diablo II, King's Quest V-VII, Loom). Playing one of these games is like watching a movie 20 times, so after that I'm really invested in the story and characters. Plus, I bet the interaction has something to do with it. I don't think most critics in their right mind would take Chrono Trigger over The Godfather, but I would. Strange!

Wait, wasn't this a blog about all sorts of Buddhism just a couple months ago?

Maybe. I am still meditating, but not as much or as effectively as I was in September or October. The biggest reason is continued travel. Something different happens every day, and I have a lot of things that I must plan, so the likelihood of a free half hour to meditate is lower, and when it happens my mind is super full.

But I'm still on "half an hour most days", so there is hope. And while I'm not attaining any bhumis, jhanas, or other mental fireworks, I think I am noticing some subtle changes. Like my crazy day zipping around Bangalore to satisfy the whims of a few bureaucratic babus, when I really noticed my anxiety and frustration and didn't fight it all too much.

My mind is changing for the better! I could even tell a pretty good story about my life turning a corner. I feel like I've been cutting things out of my life, removing responsibilities, physical things, even relationships, to pare things down to a quite minimal life. Right now I don't really have to do much ever, and I would be pretty okay if I lost everything except my backpack.

But minimalism is not enough! Cut everything out, and then what? I used to think I wanted to create something big. Then I thought, naw, you only want to create something big if you're insecure and you want to be famous. But I think there's a difference. You only want to be famous if you're insecure and you want to be famous. You can dedicate yourself to creating something big, or something good, in an inspired, energizing way, rather than a sapping, fame-seeking way.

Here's hoping I can. Simplifying and cutting things out is easy; creating and building is the hard part. Ram asked me and Nicole what 2012 would be; maybe it's the year I start creating.

Related: creating is good, because "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."
Also maybe related: in the past, I might have looked at this list and thought "geez, look at holier-than-thou here telling me all this impossible stuff to do." Now I'm kind of inspired.

More interesting things

Email doesn't ruin real-world relationships. Facebook increases your social support a lot. The internet is good for you. This is good news.

Some stress is good for you. A lot of stress is bad, trauma is bad, but living in a perfect bubble world is bad too.

This post about tips to enjoy your vacation more is awesome. Science says: take a vacation of 3-6 days. Make the peak and the end awesome. Hang out with your family, particularly eating ice cream.
(am I becoming just a filter for Barking Up the Wrong Tree and Wired Frontal Cortex? ... maybe.)

Thought scraps

"Things are as they are": this seems about the fourth thing you say after you live in a place for a while. First, "place X is great"; second, "place X is bad and here's why"; third, some subtler things about place X, that it's friendlier or colder or sleepier or grander or whatever; and fourth, "well, okay. Place X is place X." You stop generalizing. I feel like this is when intelligent conversation can start. (either that, or what I'm saying is "stop writing about places." Hmm, that doesn't seem right.)
Thoughts of an expat in Bishkek
A counterexample: an article about Bhutan that generalizes, and is annoying as a result.

So traveling is great, right, and especially after that post about world-curating, one might think I'm advocating a lot of traveling and a lot of randomness injected into your life. Why do I say only 20%? Because I think conventional wisdom is mostly correct: society progresses by abstracting and automating details like how to get water for the day. I couldn't do a lick of work here. Even, I think, if I lived here. But furthermore, if I lived here, I think my life would be poorer in a lot of ways. You can't get as good variety of music or movies, activities to do, organizations to join. Western life offers a nice lot of complexity, and I mean that in the positive, Csikszentmihalyi sense of "differentiated parts working together as one."

I like cricket. Time will tell if this is like stroopwafels, which I pretend to like while I'm there, or herring, which is actually great.

There's a different take on interruption here. In the US, you get stuff like "Never ask a busy person to lunch." Here, people I've met seem pretty much more okay with being interrupted.

Someone else who's figured out food. Orexin, I guess: sugar kills it, protein helps it, and it in turn helps us to be alert and have energy and so on. This drives me nuts. How does this fit in with everything else that the body does?
Also by Lehrer, but more convincing: I guess I should be chewing gum.

Living by yourself is pretty nice for us control-freaky types. I resonated pretty well with this article about an Indian lady being less stressed after losing her maid. It's hard to live in a place with someone else; you just feel like you're being watched, and that every move has to be right in some way. But perhaps this is just an extreme example of me curating my world!

Inspirations from a Creed music video

Well, a live version of "My Sacrifice", to be exact. So Creed. They look kind of like meatheads. They have rather shaved heads that are smaller than their necks. They look like those guys you went to high school with.

Wait a minute. Why are they "those guys you went to high school with", and not "those guys you talk to every day"? Was high school the last time you interacted with a jock? Why is that, and is it a bad thing?

Why is that: it's because you curate your own world around yourself. You don't want to hang out with jocks, so you surround yourself with non-jocks. (This happens pretty easily: get a tech job and move to a hip neighborhood. If you run into a jock, just ignore him and hang out with your friends again.)

Is curating your own world a bad thing: Well... world-curating has some nice effects. You like the people around you, you don't get shoved into lockers, you can just start talking about Wizard People Dear Reader or Python or Sufjan Stevens whenever. I suppose the problem then is that we get worse at dealing with stuff that's not in our bubbles. You might have to deal with a jock someday, but your jock-skills will have atrophied.

Is curating your own world inevitable: maybe, yes. Almost by definition, we'll keep going for more of what we like and less of what we don't. The world will continue to supply us with the same, in higher quantities, for less money, and in more places. If I decide I'm tired of Delhi, I can flip on the A/C, find some Chinese or Italian or whatever food, tune in to my computer/phone/Kindle, and I'm in a climate-controlled, food-controlled, information-controlled bubble all of my choosing.

What's the answer? Maybe just not curating too much. If you refuse to curate your world, you'll just get random everything all the time. (It's like traveling in India: exciting, wearying, and impossible as a long-term lifestyle.) If you go for, say, 80% curated and 20% random, you'll get to mostly-enjoy a mostly-smooth life, while still inoculating yourself against all the tough stuff.

How can we inject 20% randomness into our carefully-curated lives? If you know the answer to that one, let me know.

Like a reverse Grinch, my heart just shrank three sizes

I went out to get some change. I had only 500-rupee notes, and I owed a guy 44 for laundry. It's late at night, most things are closed, but there's a little ice cream shop across the way selling gourmet deluxe ice cream for 39 rupees. (it's only so expensive because it's on Park St. in Kolkata, which is sort of like Park Ave. in New York.) Well, it would get me some change, and it sounded kind of nice; I mean, I like ice cream.

And a beggar guy came up saying how he's trying to get food to feed his children, and I can go buy him the food, he doesn't want money, etc. His name is Sunil. Of course he's lying, but there's that little bluebird of doubt: maybe he's not. I'm in India; who knows. I can go buy him the food. I can see him get some food. I can hand over only enough money for the food. And it would also get me some change. This bird's voice was quite amplified by the fact that I was going to buy a scoop of gourmet ice cream. Suddenly that seemed rather trivial.

We pass some kids sleeping on the sidewalk, who Sunil says are his. And we walk to the place, it's a little run down 3-square-foot hovel where too many kids and adults are wolfing down dal and a couple dudes are cooking chapati over charcoal. And this is the point I don't know exactly how to manage, and therefore this is the point when I get screwed. There's a flurry of Hindi (Bengali?), and somehow Sunil has a bag of chapatis and says it's 150 rupees ($3). I balk, because 150 rupees could buy about five street meals. Of course, I want him to have about five street meals, or at least three, given that he has two kids. If he said one meal was 30 rupees, I'd give him 180 and say "get your kids breakfast tomorrow too." But it's just some chapati! So Sunil says "Oh, I forgot, the chicken" and soon he has also two clay containers that I assume contain chicken. This is still not even close to 150 rupees, but we're getting within my margin of error. I hand over 150 rupees.

Immediately I regret it. There is no way this cost 150 rupees; I'd say 50, tops. Therefore, I am conned somehow. At best, Sunil and his kids ate, and Sunil and the restaurant split the 100 extra rupees. At worst, Sunil just handed the chapatis and chicken back after I walked away, Sunil and the restaurant split 150 rupees, Sunil spent his half on cheap hash, and his kids still didn't eat.

Okay, of course I'm angry, and of course there's nothing I can do about it. Luckily it's only $3, but I feel used.

How can I prevent this in the future? The solution I'd like to adopt is, when approached by a beggar, to categorically yell angrily and move as if to hit him; perhaps this would convince some of them that not all white people are money bags, and that there might be some negative consequence to trying to run their scams. However, this solution is rather uncouth, as well as disastrous if someone is actually honest. I guess the best solution is to just categorically refuse beggars.

It's like an essay I was reading about people who are angry about new changes in video games. Instead of posting on forums about how awful the new change is, they should just stop playing. It doesn't get you any of the "satisfaction" of venting, but to vent and continue playing only signals that you don't really mind the new change. And nobody listens when you vent, and venting does nothing to you besides make your anger worse. Similarly, anything I do besides simply refusing beggars will only make things worse.

Okay okay, so it took me 25 years to learn that I shouldn't give money to beggars, okay, no kidding. Well, I've finally learned it! Sigh.

Another step towards eating ideal food

http://gettingstronger.org/2011/11/obesity-starts-in-the-brain-2/

Long article, kind of tough to read, and he's proposing a new understanding of how our bodies work, and if I had a nickel for every time someone "figured it all out"...

But it ties together a lot of things that don't make sense with existing theories of how people eat, by dividing "fat" into "subcutaneous fat" (folds around your body) and "intra-abdominal fat" (beer belly). And they're largely caused by failures of insulin or leptin or both. (either not enough, or too much resistance.) And either way, cut out bad sugars and bad fats.

This is more appealing than mainstream diet notions (i.e. low fat), which are insane, and I don't trust corporations or the government to give me honest nutrition advice. This is also more appealing than the low-carb or paleo people, because it explains how most of the world eats mostly grains and doesn't die.

Downsides: he's mostly talking about obesity, while I'm looking for "how to eat best." Also he doesn't explain how fructose (fruit sugar) got to be "bad" for us. But it's an interesting batch of ideas that seem mostly sensible.

Google Reader Sweep

I don't like to post a big list of "here are interesting things"; I'd rather formulate them into useful and easily-digested stories to make a coherent point. However, I haven't had time. So here are interesting things.

• Carbs are good for test performance. First time in a while I've heard of carbs being good for anything.
• What defines a good working life? What indeed. Maybe I'll post more about this.
• Steve Jobs's Buddhist influences. Ooh aah. What is the sound of one hand unlocking an iphone. I guess I like to be contrary, but I'm a tiny bit sick of the Cult of Steve. I mean, really, some of his advice, and some of the "wise Steve" stories we tell, are self-fulfilling; the fact that Steve said "never settle" and ended up extraordinary doesn't mean that "never settle" is good advice. It's like a lottery winner saying "play the lottery." Also, he was a terrible jerk. Again: what defines a good working life? I don't think Steve Jobs is a role model here. And if he is, he's the one in a million.
• I thought I was so clever reading this xkcd about maps, like "ooh I've got a Peters map, it's great, let's see what he has to say about that!" And then I got to the end, read up on explain xkcd, and realized I am an idiot. Hah!
• Another bit about segmented/two-stage sleep: monks who did it basically found it unnatural and hard to get used to. They did dream/hallucinate a little more though. Given the limited support for two-stage sleep (basically three people, Wehr, Ekirch, and Gamble), I'm not so interested anymore.
• Wow, Facebook is good for you. Or at least, it provides social support like people hoped it would, and doesn't isolate you like critics say.
• We keep taking risks up to age 50. 50! I used to think that interesting life was over at 25, or 30, or 35, but I guess we keep on being awesome for a lot longer. (not to say that post-50 is not-awesome. indeed, 50 seems to me a good age to settle down a bit. spend more time improving or enjoying what you've got, rather than trying new stuff.)
• Women are becoming the dominant sex, basically because we don't need men to lift heavy things or fight people so much anymore. Women are better at college. Furthermore, the numerical gender balance is tipping towards women too, and marriage is taking a hit. Fewer desirable men means men screw around and women don't want them. But this is okay: rather than "destroying marriage" or whatever, maybe we're returning marriage to a reasonable level of importance, down from the 1950s nuclear family obsession.
  "the cultural fixation on the couple blinds us to the full web of relationships that sustain us on a daily basis. We are far more than whom we are (or aren’t) married to: we are also friends, grandparents, colleagues, cousins, and so on. To ignore the depth and complexities of these networks is to limit the full range of our emotional experiences."
• Tangentially relatedly, but interesting on its own: obesity is caused by snacking. Not by poor people eating at McDonald's. Huh! This seems very counter-intuitive to me, but I can believe it. Incidentally, "only buy foods that require significant preparation" is pretty similar to "keep nothing immediately edible in my house", which I proposed a few weeks ago.

Whew! Man, I could talk about these for ages. Okay, off the computer now.

Movember; this is a great idea.

Guess I'm late to this party (sorry, I'm in Nepal!), but http://mobro.co/dantasse ... it's at least a moderately important cause to me. (and the folks running this are genius.) If you'd care to give a few bucks, all the dudes in my family and I thank you.

Note that I have to look respectable to a border guard on the 19th. Luckily, my moustache still won't be visible then, so no big deal.

(also, sorry if I'm repeating myself on all the social networks! I wonder if there is a smarter way to do this.)

Progress is a steady stream of generating more wealth and sharing it more equally?

From Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods":

"Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This ... did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. ... All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest- almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked."

Combine that with this: Americans are happier when the wealth is more evenly distributed. Not to mention, the poorest (/least "developed") countries are often the ones with the most inequality.

So why are our taxes on the rich not really high? Maybe because we fall under the last bit of that Wired article: we don't like a more even society, if we competed to earn our wealth. So our national ethical system values "fairness" too much? I guess the 53% guy (who is responding to the 99% people; btw I love this bunch of the 1%) makes this pretty clear. But as Max Udargo makes clear in his excellent response, you can say "those lazy bums don't deserve my money", but what do you gain? You just get a worse society than if you distribute the wealth more evenly. Everyone loses, because we insist on valuing fairness over harm-reduction.

I guess that's my argument for taxing the rich more. Throw it in with all the rest.

Well, besides my other argument, which is: I want to live in a world where kids don't yell "Give me money!" when I ride past.

Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English

I just read this book, Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English. I got it because I had read Mindfulness in Plain English and it was very good. Also, Daniel Ingram recommended the author, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, as someone who writes well about jhanas. (again, jhanas are states of high concentration, and concentration is one of the three practices to get you to enlightenment. The others are morality and insight.)

Some things I learned:

- I was pretty naive about how big a deal achieving even the first jhana is. Ingram made it sound easy. Gunaratana recommends at least an hour meditating skillfully, ideally longer sessions in a retreat setting, and notes that "most meditators practice in access concentration (a prerequisite to any jhana) for a good while before attaining jhana." So maybe I'm further away than I thought.

- However, I am pretty sure that I've achieved access concentration! The descriptions he gives sound a lot like what I felt in those two half-hour sessions towards the end of this past retreat: a strengthening of concentration, maybe slightly odd visions, maybe a feeling of lightness.

- However, I think I was "doing it wrong", in that I was trying to force it. I really wanted that concentrated state, and I just kinda tossed insight aside. Gunaratana makes it clear that you have to practice concentration mindfully or else you might develop "wrong concentration"- absorption without mindfulness. Wrong concentration is dangerous, because you might actually achieve some blissful states and get really wrapped up in them, and then you won't be able to develop insight because you're so attached to absorption.

- Thus, the kind of concentration I'm looking for is not "just concentrating a lot" or "becoming one with ____" where ____ is your breath or a candle or a clay disc or whatever.

- Given all this, I think I'm more at peace with the slow boat to enlightenment. Reading Ingram, I wanted to get enlightened in 5 years. Reading someone more mainstream like Gunaratana, I'm reminded how you can't really rush it; or, you can rush it, but by putting in the work, not by just wanting it to go faster. I could get enlightened in 5 years, but I'd have to spend a lot more time in retreats and daily practice. And I'm not a monk, nor do I currently want to be one.

Positive mental time travel

Buddhism aside (whew! I do worry about this blog getting religious.), I read a thing about how people had the best moods when either their minds were on what they were doing, or they were engaged in "positive mental time travel": looking forward to good things in the future, or remembering nice things in the past.

I've been doing that a lot recently. It helped get through that retreat. It may not be what I should have been doing, but still. It also helps, say, when I'm cold, simultaneously lonely and sick of talking to people, and fighting spiders. In mental fantasy land, I've never fought with anyone, you're all radiant angels of goodness, and my life's future holds 8 months of joyful and fulfilling vacation followed by an equally marvelous career and life back at home.

I'm not going to debate whether this is a good strategy or not. (see? no Buddhism for now.) Let me just say one thing, though: thanks to you all for helping me to create such nice memories and things to look forward to!

Been killing spiders

A bunch of them, recently. Sometimes I wonder if that's okay to do. I wonder this more whenever I read or think a lot about Buddhism, which is a lot recently. It is particularly awkward when there are spiders in my bathroom at a Buddhist retreat center.

See, in Buddhism, all life is sacred. They say don't kill any living beings, including bugs. They often have stories, too, about so-and-so monk who would catch flies and release them, unharmed, outdoors and how he accumulated such great karma or merit or whatever.

Well, it's a consistent enough teaching, anyway. At some point, you have to decide what's sacred. You have to draw a line and say "you can kill anything below this line, and nothing above this line." Modern secular Westerners draw that line right below humans. Buddhists draw that line below bugs (and above plants, I guess, even though those are alive also; maybe by "living", Buddhists mean "animate" or something). Vegetarians might draw the line below the animal kingdom but above bugs. Or below bugs. Whatever. And then there's also the debate about unborn babies/fetuses/lumps of cells: are they above the line? How can we answer this?

I like Ken Wilber's philosophy on this, based on a book of his that I read and half understood a while ago. The part I remembered is: "Honor complexity." Humans are above the line because we're so complex, particularly our brains. Bugs are just a few nerves and an exoskeleton: below the line. This solves a lot of dilemmas: you don't have to discuss consciousness, you don't have to worry about souls, you can neatly handle any new edge case. (new bacteria from Neptune? well, how complex is it?)

Side note: the part that will likely cheese a lot of people off is that it doesn't line up with old-fashioned definitions of "life". For example, anyone will agree that an ant is alive. But what about one of these supercomputer weather simulators, say. That's probably more complex than the ant; is it alive? is it sacred? (I personally take a bit of perverse pleasure in gleefully saying yes, it is more morally okay to kill an ant than a supercomputer.)

But anyway, if you're still with me, then we've got a philosophical metric of sacredness with no real-world way to measure it. I mean, we could measure computer vs. computer in a few ways (and even that is difficult), but how could we possibly compare the complexity of a supercomputer with, say, a rat's brain?

I don't know. All I know is, for right now I'm using that argument to rationalize going against all the Buddhist wisdom and killing spiders.

Life choices, if life weren't handed on a platter to us rich white Americans?

I've kind of taken it for granted my entire life that working for money isn't a good idea, that things aren't worth worrying about, and that money won't buy happiness.

This all assumes that I'll always have enough money. What if I didn't? Suddenly, working for money becomes a viable and smart career option. Until you get to that diminishing returns point ($40k/yr? $60k?), one dollar equals one util!

Other luxuries include control over my time. I take flexible hours and vacation time for granted. At home I could pretty much choose to do whatever I want whenever I want. Traveling now, not quite as much (sometimes more than others). If I were working, and had a more restrictive job, even less.

Maybe I'll get enlightened instead of having kids.

One question with undertaking a quest like "get enlightened" is: how do I plan to do this? I'm not prepared to give up my career. A healthy social life is, well, healthy, and I'm not prepared to give that up either. I'd like to get married someday. How will I find time to do all the things that everyone else does, and also get enlightened?

Here's an idea: not have kids.

Kids don't make you happier, for any definition of happier. I particularly don't think kids would make me happier. And one more enlightened being in the world is probably more beneficial in a grand sense than 2 or 3 more confused small people. I don't see much of a downside here.

(I want to put some disclaimer here that I know enlightenment is not a panacea, and then go on to describe all the ways that people who have achieved enlightenment are not automatically perfect radiant superman buddhas, but I said I'd stop blogging, so I'll have to save that for another time.)

Making the Best Life

As I'm taking a year of life that is different than most life, I get a good chance to reflect on ways I want my next settled life (that is, my grad student life) to be. The difficult thing is that everything is different now, so I can't run experiments on diet, sleep, caffeine, etc, because of all the confounding factors. The nice thing is that I have a lot of time to figure out ideas and a lot of diverse experiences.

Some thoughts, and I'm open to everything from the profound to the mundane

- make sure there's a farmers' market near my house and at least one good coffeeshop. This has been nice in Seattle.
- keep biking. This is also good.
- meditation will probably still be in the morning. An hour would be a nice number. After sitting for an hour or more many times these past two weeks, I've jumped up to 45 minutes in the morning, which feels totally doable now. I'll work up from there.
- make a bunch of Indian food. Dishes/appliances I would like include a food processor and a big wok, or maybe a cast-iron skillet. (That's the best thing for a skillet, right? I'm cool with maintenance.)
- here's a thought: keep nothing immediately edible in my house. I've enjoyed staying a bit hungry, and if food always required me to work, I'd probably get back to 3 standard meals/day and feel pretty good.
- somehow limit, but not eliminate, drinking. Like Gerrit's "only drink in houses, not bars" idea.
- make sure my home desk setup works nicely. Big monitor, comfortable chair. Or standing desk?
- figure out something about sleep. Sleeping naturally always is nice, but it'd be good if it didn't take so long.

And one more thought, which probably deserves its own post (and then I'll quit blogging for tonight, promise).

My mental state and current meditation plan

I'd say "plan of attack", but that doesn't sound right.

Two weeks ago, I was starting a 10-day meditation course, for over 90 hours of meditation. My previous total meditation experience is probably (1 year * average maybe 10 minutes/day) + (1 year * 20 min/day) + (1 month * 30 min/day) + (2 retreats = 20 hrs) = ~180 hours. So this retreat is half as much meditation as I've done ever. (now I've got 270 hours, so I'm 2.7% of an expert, if you ask Malcolm Gladwell!)

Given that, I figured I could make some real progress. I've just been amped up on descriptions of jhanas and stages of insight from Daniel Ingram, and he suggests attaining the first (samatha) jhana first. Two reasons: it's very blissful, which will make you want to meditate more, and once you're in this state, you can examine it for the characteristics of impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self, and go on to insight practice from there.

Sounded good to me. I'm not really sure how to get there, but I think you just concentrate hard. A point along the path to the first jhana is "access concentration", where you get the ability to concentrate on whatever you want for as long as you want. The ability to, say, concentrate on your breath for an hour and never let your mind wander.

What happened: Over the 10 days, I didn't experience anything that I'd consider a jhana. I had a couple times I concentrated on my breath for a good half hour without losing focus, and then had some mildly dreamy thoughts/visions, but I think that attaching special significance to those is is wishful thinking. On the other hand, I had a couple times I concentrated on my breath for a good half hour without losing focus, so that's a start. Both times occurred in the evening, 6-7pm, after a very light dinner and some tea.

So what now? I think keep on track with the concentration. Once I hit the first jhana (or maybe second; it sounds nice and easier to maintain) and can regularly get there, then I'll start back to insight/Vipassana practice. It feels weird to learn Goenka-style Vipassana and immediately drop it (and Mahasi Sayadaw-style Vipassana) and go for concentration, but it seems good for the two reasons above, and also so I can post "I hit something repeatable and definitely qualitatively different from my regular mind, therefore I'm not just wasting time sitting on pillows."

Goenka-style Vipassana meditation, and my reactions

I spent 10 days at a Buddhist Vipassana meditation course led by S.N. Goenka. I've explained more about the course itself on my travel blog. Here I'll explain in more depth the teaching:

• Proper living (/enlightenment) has 3 parts: Sila (morality), Samadhi (concentration), Panna ("pan-ya", with tildes on the n's. wisdom.) Sounds familiar.
• Morality is just living your ordinary life well. Five precepts, etc. It's simple enough- we've been learning this our whole lives. Not to say it's easy, but it's more or less simple.
• Concentration can be developed by a lot of meditative practices, including "Anapana" meditation, where you just focus on the feeling of your breath in the nose. Just focus on it. When your mind wanders, gently bring it back, non-judgmentally.
• Wisdom can be developed by Vipassana meditation. In Goenka's teaching, Vipassana goes as follows: feel the sensations in your body, both the gross sensations (like pain in your knees) and the subtle ones (like just focus on your hands, right now, and after a few seconds you'll probably feel a little tingling, or maybe heartbeat-like pulsing.) Notice them, develop your awareness, and also develop your equanimity- don't react to them with clinging or aversion.
• How does Vipassana meditation develop wisdom? You start to realize that you have no permanent independent "self"; you are constantly changing. Every sensation is something changing on a small level. Eventually you realize that everything is impermanent ("anitcha") and that will bring you to enlightenment.
• Also, any attachment or aversion you develop is like a line you draw in a rock, or a "sankara", that lies deep within you. When you just notice all your sensations with equanimity, you stop generating new sankaras, and your old ones bubble up to the surface and get evaporated. When you evaporate all your sankaras, you'll be enlightened.

I mostly like his teachings. Here are things about the teachings that I like:

• it's mostly in line with things I know about Buddhism.
• the body-scanning technique is kind of like the Mahasi Sayadaw-style mind-scanning technique I'd been doing, but for the body instead of the mind. This is sort of easier, because you can go in a direction. Start at the top of the head and go down, start at the feet and go up. You can't really scan the whole mind.

But I have a few beefs. Here are some things I don't like, ordered from least crazy to most crazy:

• solving your mind's problems through the body seems like the wrong way to do it. Like debugging software by examining the entire contents of memory. It might work sometimes, but usually it's just inefficient. But then, I am willing to concede that I might be wrong here.
• plus, it's kinda boring. After I scan a couple times, I get bored.
• he teaches his style of Vipassana as if it is the only way to do Vipassana. Obviously this is frustrating.
• he keeps arguing against straw-man organized religions. "Vipassana is a technique, not an organized religion where you do this ritual and pray to that god and do this good deed and then you get rewarded after death." I think very few people would agree that their own religion is "do this ritual and pray to that god and do this good deed and then you get rewarded after death."
• at some point he started talking about "kalapas", which are the tiniest particles, smaller than quarks, that make up matter. Apparently each kalapa has the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. I'll stop here because you can probably sense my scowl.
• he also liked to talk about the "law of nature", which I think had something to do with karma, in the sense of "if you do something bad, that will come back to bite you." Guys, this is false. Or he'd start off a story with "there's this guy who had a fortunate life due to some past karma..." Hey, sounds like "do this good deed and you get rewarded after death." (admittedly, he talked about karma sometimes in a non-wacky sense, like how if you generate anger towards someone, it hurts you too.)
• that bit about the sankaras! That makes no sense! He offers no explanation as to how this happens, beyond some hand-wavey thing where I guess, e.g., you might develop anger towards someone, and then you'll get a sankara, and later it'll manifest itself as a pain in your foot. I don't know.
• and then, after all this, he says "Buddhism is scientific!" ... Goenka-ji, it can be, but you're doing it wrong.

So you might get the idea that I thought the whole thing was crazy. Not so. Most of it actually made a lot of sense, and it was only about 10% talking, 90% meditating anyway. You don't go to this retreat to philosophize, you go to meditate. And now that I think about it, if you just skipped all the dharma talks after maybe day 4, you could have a really great retreat. (however, this is very frowned upon.)

And as Goenka said, if you are eating delicious kheer, and you find a cardamom seed that you don't like, then just leave it aside and eat the rest of the kheer. Eventually you may realize that you like cardamom too, and then you eat that bit. Or maybe not, also fine.

Buddhism has a 4th grader's understanding of alcohol

Okay okay, 10 days without talking, and I love to talk. I have a lot of things to say. I am very limited by my internet connectivity, and the fact that I want to sleep. This is mildly frustrating. So I'll lead off with this thought because it's quick.

The Five Precepts in Buddhism are: don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, don't have sexual misconduct, and don't take intoxicants (including alcohol). Monks take these (along with a host of others). During retreats, non-monks take these too. Non-monks are further encouraged to take these precepts during normal times too. The first four are of course fine; who could disagree with those? But the fifth one seems a bit severe in our society. I've heard two reasons, and I can think of a third:

1. "When you drink, you become more likely to do all the other bad things." Or sometimes "a drunk person is like a madman" which is kind of like D.A.R.E.'s outlook on booze: you're either sober or drunk. I could see a precept against getting drunk, but against all drinking seems extreme. You can still control yourself.

2. "Continuity of mindfulness is important, so even getting mindless for a couple hours can really hurt your practice." Okay, this argument is more legit. Still, really? No breaks? What about when you're sleeping? And it's not like I'm mindful anywhere near 24/7 anyway...

3. Cultural factors. In Europe, say, everyone drinks sometimes. In India, it's rarer, and maybe back around Buddha's time, the only people who drank were the town drunks. So in this case, this precept seems out of place. (imagine if Buddhism started in Europe, and there was a precept against drinking tea!)

At any rate, could we replace it with "don't use intoxicants irresponsibly"? (or perhaps this is impossible and I just want to have my enlightenment and eat drink it too.)